A Beautiful Mind
© John McManamy
As a 20-year-old doctoral candidate in mathematics at Princeton in 1948, John Nash was the odd one out, an outlander from West Virginia who simultaneously felt superior to and out of sorts with his preppie colleagues. "There could be a mathematical explanation for how bad your tie is," he tells one classmate. While at Princeton, he came up with a strikingly original contribution to games theory (which purports to predict seemingly random human behavior) that would win him the Nobel Prize in Economics nearly fifty years later, but a full 25 years in between would be lost to schizophrenia.
Ron Howard has produced and directed a film based on John Nash's life, "A Beautiful Mind," starring Russell Crowe in a tour de force performance that makes him a strong candidate for his second Oscar in a row. Schizophrenia may be vastly different from our own life experience, but we share enough of the same symptoms and meds - not to mention treatments, hospitalizations, and stigma - to feel we are watching as insiders. Accordingly, when John Nash's reality dissolves into madness and he is bundled into the back seat on his way to involuntary commitment, we relive all the horror and shame and hurt of our own life stories. There's no point in trying to suppress a tear. Mother Nature has just delivered one of its fiercest blows and we more than anyone else on the planet have an inkling of what that's like.
At the same time, however, comes that feeling of great release. They GET it! you want to jump up and shout. After all these years, all this time, someone out there actually gets it. Maybe the people who voted down mental health parity will see the film, one dares think. Maybe the producers of all those prime time shows that portray the mentally ill as violent 72 percent of the time will be inspired to come up with sympathetic characters.
But this is Hollywood, and the movie takes some sharp deviations from real life. By far the most contentious is when Russell Crowe's character decides to go off his meds so he can have a clear head to continue with his work. The hero ethos of Hollywood demands nothing less, but one needs to check the credits to be assured that psychiatry's antichrist Peter Breggin was not the movie's technical adviser. In the end, this fictitious John Nash, now on newer meds, acknowledges that the illness is something he can at best accommodate, not overcome. This mitigates the antipsychiatry theme of the movie, somewhat, but now we are left with the wrong impression that schizophrenia
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