A beautiful Mind
Play the Music from the Movie [745 KB] A Beautiful Mind is a motion picture of the life journey of Dr. John Nash, a mathematician with Schizophrenia who overcame the challenges of the disease and went on to win The Nobel Peace Prize in 1994. Everyone who comes here should find a way to see the story for themselves, for it is rich in understanding of life's journey. There are four parts to this page: A review of the movie by Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun Times; A review of the movie by the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill [NAMI]; The definition of Schizophrenia and elements of mental disorders An offering. Roger Ebert Review The original review is at http://www.suntimes.com/ebert/ebert_reviews/2001/12/122101.html A BEAUTIFUL MIND / **** (PG-13) December 21, 2001 John Nash: Russell Crowe Parcher: Ed Harris Alicia: Jennifer Connelly Charles: Paul Bettany Dr. Rosen: Christopher Plummer Helinger: Judd Hirsch Universal Pictures presents a film directed by Ron Howard. Written by Akiva Goldsman based on the book by Sylvia Nasar. Running time: 129 minutes. Rated PG-13 (for intense thematic material, sexual content and a scene of violence). Opening today exclusively at 900 N. Michigan; opens Dec. 25 at local theaters. BY ROGER EBERT The Nobel Prize winner John Forbes Nash Jr. still teaches at Princeton, and walks to campus every day. That these commonplace statements nearly brought tears to my eyes suggests the power of "A Beautiful Mind," the story of a man who is one of the greatest mathematicians, and a victim of schizophrenia. Nash's discoveries in game theory have an impact on our lives every day. He also believed for a time that Russians were sending him coded messages on the front page of the New York Times. "A Beautiful Mind" stars Russell Crowe as Nash, and Jennifer Connelly as his wife, Alicia, who is pregnant with their child when the first symptoms of his disease become apparent. It tells the story of a man whose mind was of enormous service to humanity while at the same time betrayed him with frightening delusions. Crowe brings the character to life by sidestepping sensationalism and building with small behavioral details. He shows a man who descends into madness and then, unexpectedly, regains the ability to function in the academic world. Nash has been compared to Newton, Mendel and Darwin, but was also for many years just a man muttering to himself in the corner. Director Ron Howard is able to suggest a core of goodness in Nash that inspired his wife and others to stand by him, to keep hope and, in her words in his darkest hour, "to believe that something extraordinary is possible." The movie's Nash begins as a quiet but cocky young man with a West Virginia accent, who gradually turns into a tortured, secretive paranoid who believes he is a spy being trailed by government agents. Crowe, who has an uncanny ability to modify his look to fit a role, always seems convincing as a man who ages 47 years during the film. The early Nash, seen at Princeton in the late 1940s, calmly tells a scholarship winner "there is not a single seminal idea on either of your papers." When he loses at a game of Go, he explains: "I had the first move. My play was perfect. The game is flawed." He is aware of his impact on others ("I don't much like people and they don't much like me") and recalls that his first-grade teacher said he was "born with two helpings of brain and a half-helping of heart." It is Alicia who helps him find the heart. She is a graduate student when they meet, is attracted to his genius, is touched by his loneliness, is able to accept his idea of courtship when he informs her, "Ritual requires we proceed with a number of platonic activities before we have sex." To the degree that he can be touched, she touches him, although often he seems trapped inside himself; Sylvia Nasar, who wrote the 1998 biography that informs Akiva Goldsman's screenplay, begins her book by quoting Wordsworth about "a man forever voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone." Nash's schizophrenia takes a literal, visual form. He believes he is being pursued by a federal agent (Ed Harris), and imagines himself in chase scenes that seem inspired by 1940s crime movies. He begins to find patterns where no patterns exist. One night he and Alicia stand under the sky and he asks her to name any object, and then connects stars to draw it. Romantic, but it's not so romantic when she discovers his office thickly papered with countless bits torn from newspapers and magazines and connected by frantic lines into imaginary patterns. The movie traces his treatment by an understanding psychiatrist (Christopher Plummer), and his agonizing courses of insulin shock therapy. Medication helps him improve somewhat--but only, of course, when he takes the medication. Eventually newer drugs are more effective, and he begins a tentative re-entry into the academic world at Princeton. The movie fascinated me about the life of this man, and I sought more information, finding that for many years he was a recluse, wandering the campus, talking to no one, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, paging through piles of newspapers and magazines. And then one day he paid a quite ordinary compliment to a colleague about his daughter, and it was noticed that Nash seemed better. There is a remarkable scene in the movie when a representative for the Nobel committee (Austin Pendleton) comes visiting, and hints that he is being "considered" for the prize. Nash observes that people are usually informed they have won, not that they are being considered: "You came here to find out if I am crazy and would screw everything up if I won." He did win, and did not screw everything up. The movies have a way of pushing mental illness into corners. It is grotesque, sensational, cute, funny, willful, tragic or perverse. Here it is simply a disease, which renders life almost but not quite impossible for Nash and his wife, before he becomes one of the lucky ones to pull out of the downward spiral. When he won the Nobel, Nash was asked to write about his life, and he was honest enough to say his recovery is "not entirely a matter of joy." He observes: "Without his 'madness,' Zarathustra would necessarily have been only another of the millions or billions of human individuals who have lived and then been forgotten." Without his madness, would Nash have also lived and then been forgotten? Did his ability to penetrate the most difficult reaches of mathematical thought somehow come with a price attached? The movie does not know and cannot say. Copyright © Chicago Sun-Times Inc.. NAMI Review Whether or not "A Beautiful Mind" takes home any Academy Awards, the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) declares the film is a winner. "Our members are the movie's toughest critics," said NAMI director Richard Birkel. "They have experienced mental illness first-hand. "A Beautiful Mind" represents a breakthrough of historic proportions. It is authentic. It speaks many truths." "Director Ron Howard, actor Russell Crowe and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman deserve more than Oscars," Birkel said. "They deserve a prize for bridging the gap between entertainment and public education about schizophrenia." Xavier Amador, Ph.D., director of NAMI's Center on Education, Research & Practice said: "The experience of having schizophrenia is nearly impossible for the average person to grasp. The film takes you inside the mind of someone battling to separate reality from delusion. It is no small feat. The impact goes far beyond what the filmmakers ever could imagine." Amador listed key truths from the movie: * Dignity and respect optimize recovery. * Many people with schizophrenia suffer from poor insight, or anosognosia, a symptom that delays getting help or keeps them out of treatment. * Medication plays a vital role and discontinuing medication involves major risks. In the movie, Nobel Prize winner John Nash's delusions return when he stops taking medication. Later, newer medications help him, even though his hallucinations do not go away entirely. * Faith and hope are factors for recovery. Alicia Nash (Jennifer Connelly) in the movie proclaims: "I need to believe that something extraordinary is possible." For many families today, extraordinary things happen when they have access to state-of-the-art care. Hope also endures that science will find a cure for schizophrenia. * Community reintegration is important: i.e. what Nash (Russell Crowe) in the movie calls "fitting in, being part of a community, a certain level of attachment to familiar places" in asking for permission to "hang around" Princeton University. * Supports and tolerance, particularly by employers such as Princeton, help recovery and can utilize the talents of people with mental illness. * Cognitive therapy strategies, or what Nash calls "a diet of the mind," help to discipline thought processes to ignore hallucinations and not "indulge" certain emotions. "We have made monumental advances in the last two decades, but state-of-the-art treatments and services are not as widely available as they should be." Amador said. "If they were, there would be many more 'beautiful minds' freed from prisons created by untreated mental illness and stigma." One scene in the movie has been controversial. Lying on a hospital bed in restraints in the 1950's, Nash receives insulin therapy, resulting in violent convulsions. Some viewers mistakenly believe the procedure to reflect modern treatment or electroshock therapy. "The scene is disturbing," Amador said, "but it is not the reality of treatment today." SOURCE: [NAMI] Schizophrenia Schizophrenia used to be a terrible undefined and indefinable disease; today, after 10 years of newly breaking ground, the disease is much better understood and mostly successful treatments are available. Schizophrenia is a condition based in the inherited physiological structure of the brain; particularly, in the areas of the brain involved with perception, there are too many neurons and in other portions of the brain there may be too few. This is a "double edged sword"; on one hand it may desirable to have increased mental processing power for rapid processing of perception; on the other, it opens the doors to mental overload. Here's how it works: Dr. Frederick Frese, a chief psychological administrator with schizophrenia who was once a patient at the facility at which he works was the keynote speaker for the Regional Support Network [RSN]; during one of his presentations, he showed a series of five slides, each of the same object; each of the slides contained dots representing the object; the first slide had few dots and would seemingly yield itself to understanding the nature of the object; the next one had more, until, at the last, the object in the fifth slide was clearly a five dollar bill. I couldn't figure it out until the fifth slide, but then, I was sitting in the back of the room. But one person saw what it was in the first slide. In the movie, A Beautiful Mind, schizophrenia is portrayed as an agent that permits Dr. John Nash to engage his talents to break code--he is able to gather and assess seemingly random data into an integration which represents... the right answer; it also may have enabled him to understand the principles which led to the development of economic theory which earned him the respect of his colleagues and the Nobel Prize. And it was a miserable life. He suffered from overload; in the moments of overload, his perceptions led to dangerous paranoia and delusions--delusions so powerful they were a danger to himself and his family. Our son has schizoaffective disease, which means he has the worst elements of bipolar disease [manic-depressive disorder] and schizophrenia; after many trials and severe experiences, he has the treatment he needs and is coping with the disease; after seeing the movie, he asked if he was going to win the Nobel Peace Prize; I told him it was unlikely, though he is brilliant and at one time had a 4.0 grade point average at the University of Washington. That's the sad thing about mental disorders: There are so many people suffering from them, many of them undiagnosed and 25% of all families in the United States has at least one mentally ill member; often there is no hope but to simply cope and people suffer, though it is not their fault. I used to work for a man who, sadly, was both a practicing alcoholic in the final stages and has bipolar disease; he is a man with no connections and no career, but was a brilliant technologist and an effective manager in his time; we all suffered horribly from this man's disease. A coworker had a husband and the family had various mental disorders and challenges; on September 11, 2001, he was home when he heard the news of the terrorist bombings of the twin towers in New York; he left his home, drove across the state, and apparently committed suicide; in the aftermath, he left his fifteen year old son and widow with as much as $150,000 in debt and the family in total chaos. For all of us, there is no choice in life's journey but to pick up the pieces and live the best life we can. We offer comfort and understanding to those who must cope with mental illness and it is the part of this ministry to offer hope and recovery to those who so desperately need it; there may be trials, but your life can be better and prosper, even in seemingly impossible circumstances.
Play the Music from the Movie [745 KB]
A Beautiful Mind is a motion picture of the life journey of Dr. John Nash, a mathematician with Schizophrenia who overcame the challenges of the disease and went on to win The Nobel Peace Prize in 1994.
Everyone who comes here should find a way to see the story for themselves, for it is rich in understanding of life's journey.
There are four parts to this page:
A review of the movie by Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun Times;
A review of the movie by the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill [NAMI];
The definition of Schizophrenia and elements of mental disorders
An offering.
The original review is at http://www.suntimes.com/ebert/ebert_reviews/2001/12/122101.html
December 21, 2001
John Nash: Russell Crowe Parcher: Ed Harris Alicia: Jennifer Connelly Charles: Paul Bettany Dr. Rosen: Christopher Plummer Helinger: Judd Hirsch
Universal Pictures presents a film directed by Ron Howard. Written by Akiva Goldsman based on the book by Sylvia Nasar. Running time: 129 minutes. Rated PG-13 (for intense thematic material, sexual content and a scene of violence). Opening today exclusively at 900 N. Michigan; opens Dec. 25 at local theaters.
BY ROGER EBERT
The Nobel Prize winner John Forbes Nash Jr. still teaches at Princeton, and walks to campus every day. That these commonplace statements nearly brought tears to my eyes suggests the power of "A Beautiful Mind," the story of a man who is one of the greatest mathematicians, and a victim of schizophrenia. Nash's discoveries in game theory have an impact on our lives every day. He also believed for a time that Russians were sending him coded messages on the front page of the New York Times.
"A Beautiful Mind" stars Russell Crowe as Nash, and Jennifer Connelly as his wife, Alicia, who is pregnant with their child when the first symptoms of his disease become apparent. It tells the story of a man whose mind was of enormous service to humanity while at the same time betrayed him with frightening delusions. Crowe brings the character to life by sidestepping sensationalism and building with small behavioral details. He shows a man who descends into madness and then, unexpectedly, regains the ability to function in the academic world. Nash has been compared to Newton, Mendel and Darwin, but was also for many years just a man muttering to himself in the corner.
Director Ron Howard is able to suggest a core of goodness in Nash that inspired his wife and others to stand by him, to keep hope and, in her words in his darkest hour, "to believe that something extraordinary is possible." The movie's Nash begins as a quiet but cocky young man with a West Virginia accent, who gradually turns into a tortured, secretive paranoid who believes he is a spy being trailed by government agents. Crowe, who has an uncanny ability to modify his look to fit a role, always seems convincing as a man who ages 47 years during the film.
The early Nash, seen at Princeton in the late 1940s, calmly tells a scholarship winner "there is not a single seminal idea on either of your papers." When he loses at a game of Go, he explains: "I had the first move. My play was perfect. The game is flawed." He is aware of his impact on others ("I don't much like people and they don't much like me") and recalls that his first-grade teacher said he was "born with two helpings of brain and a half-helping of heart."
It is Alicia who helps him find the heart. She is a graduate student when they meet, is attracted to his genius, is touched by his loneliness, is able to accept his idea of courtship when he informs her, "Ritual requires we proceed with a number of platonic activities before we have sex." To the degree that he can be touched, she touches him, although often he seems trapped inside himself; Sylvia Nasar, who wrote the 1998 biography that informs Akiva Goldsman's screenplay, begins her book by quoting Wordsworth about "a man forever voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone."
Nash's schizophrenia takes a literal, visual form. He believes he is being pursued by a federal agent (Ed Harris), and imagines himself in chase scenes that seem inspired by 1940s crime movies. He begins to find patterns where no patterns exist. One night he and Alicia stand under the sky and he asks her to name any object, and then connects stars to draw it. Romantic, but it's not so romantic when she discovers his office thickly papered with countless bits torn from newspapers and magazines and connected by frantic lines into imaginary patterns.
The movie traces his treatment by an understanding psychiatrist (Christopher Plummer), and his agonizing courses of insulin shock therapy. Medication helps him improve somewhat--but only, of course, when he takes the medication. Eventually newer drugs are more effective, and he begins a tentative re-entry into the academic world at Princeton.
The movie fascinated me about the life of this man, and I sought more information, finding that for many years he was a recluse, wandering the campus, talking to no one, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, paging through piles of newspapers and magazines. And then one day he paid a quite ordinary compliment to a colleague about his daughter, and it was noticed that Nash seemed better.
There is a remarkable scene in the movie when a representative for the Nobel committee (Austin Pendleton) comes visiting, and hints that he is being "considered" for the prize. Nash observes that people are usually informed they have won, not that they are being considered: "You came here to find out if I am crazy and would screw everything up if I won." He did win, and did not screw everything up.
The movies have a way of pushing mental illness into corners. It is grotesque, sensational, cute, funny, willful, tragic or perverse. Here it is simply a disease, which renders life almost but not quite impossible for Nash and his wife, before he becomes one of the lucky ones to pull out of the downward spiral.
When he won the Nobel, Nash was asked to write about his life, and he was honest enough to say his recovery is "not entirely a matter of joy." He observes: "Without his 'madness,' Zarathustra would necessarily have been only another of the millions or billions of human individuals who have lived and then been forgotten." Without his madness, would Nash have also lived and then been forgotten? Did his ability to penetrate the most difficult reaches of mathematical thought somehow come with a price attached? The movie does not know and cannot say.
Copyright © Chicago Sun-Times Inc..
Whether or not "A Beautiful Mind" takes home any Academy Awards, the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) declares the film is a winner. "Our members are the movie's toughest critics," said NAMI director Richard Birkel. "They have experienced mental illness first-hand. "A Beautiful Mind" represents a breakthrough of historic proportions. It is authentic. It speaks many truths."
"Director Ron Howard, actor Russell Crowe and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman deserve more than Oscars," Birkel said. "They deserve a prize for bridging the gap between entertainment and public education about schizophrenia." Xavier Amador, Ph.D., director of NAMI's Center on Education, Research & Practice said: "The experience of having schizophrenia is nearly impossible for the average person to grasp. The film takes you inside the mind of someone battling to separate reality from delusion. It is no small feat. The impact goes far beyond what the filmmakers ever could imagine."
Amador listed key truths from the movie:
* Dignity and respect optimize recovery. * Many people with schizophrenia suffer from poor insight, or anosognosia, a symptom that delays getting help or keeps them out of treatment. * Medication plays a vital role and discontinuing medication involves major risks. In the movie, Nobel Prize winner John Nash's delusions return when he stops taking medication. Later, newer medications help him, even though his hallucinations do not go away entirely. * Faith and hope are factors for recovery. Alicia Nash (Jennifer Connelly) in the movie proclaims: "I need to believe that something extraordinary is possible." For many families today, extraordinary things happen when they have access to state-of-the-art care. Hope also endures that science will find a cure for schizophrenia. * Community reintegration is important: i.e. what Nash (Russell Crowe) in the movie calls "fitting in, being part of a community, a certain level of attachment to familiar places" in asking for permission to "hang around" Princeton University. * Supports and tolerance, particularly by employers such as Princeton, help recovery and can utilize the talents of people with mental illness. * Cognitive therapy strategies, or what Nash calls "a diet of the mind," help to discipline thought processes to ignore hallucinations and not "indulge" certain emotions.
* Dignity and respect optimize recovery.
* Many people with schizophrenia suffer from poor insight, or anosognosia, a symptom that delays getting help or keeps them out of treatment.
* Medication plays a vital role and discontinuing medication involves major risks. In the movie, Nobel Prize winner John Nash's delusions return when he stops taking medication. Later, newer medications help him, even though his hallucinations do not go away entirely.
* Faith and hope are factors for recovery. Alicia Nash (Jennifer Connelly) in the movie proclaims: "I need to believe that something extraordinary is possible." For many families today, extraordinary things happen when they have access to state-of-the-art care. Hope also endures that science will find a cure for schizophrenia.
* Community reintegration is important: i.e. what Nash (Russell Crowe) in the movie calls "fitting in, being part of a community, a certain level of attachment to familiar places" in asking for permission to "hang around" Princeton University.
* Supports and tolerance, particularly by employers such as Princeton, help recovery and can utilize the talents of people with mental illness.
* Cognitive therapy strategies, or what Nash calls "a diet of the mind," help to discipline thought processes to ignore hallucinations and not "indulge" certain emotions.
"We have made monumental advances in the last two decades, but state-of-the-art treatments and services are not as widely available as they should be." Amador said. "If they were, there would be many more 'beautiful minds' freed from prisons created by untreated mental illness and stigma." One scene in the movie has been controversial. Lying on a hospital bed in restraints in the 1950's, Nash receives insulin therapy, resulting in violent convulsions. Some viewers mistakenly believe the procedure to reflect modern treatment or electroshock therapy. "The scene is disturbing," Amador said, "but it is not the reality of treatment today."
SOURCE: [NAMI]
Schizophrenia used to be a terrible undefined and indefinable disease; today, after 10 years of newly breaking ground, the disease is much better understood and mostly successful treatments are available.
Schizophrenia is a condition based in the inherited physiological structure of the brain; particularly, in the areas of the brain involved with perception, there are too many neurons and in other portions of the brain there may be too few.
This is a "double edged sword"; on one hand it may desirable to have increased mental processing power for rapid processing of perception; on the other, it opens the doors to mental overload.
Here's how it works: Dr. Frederick Frese, a chief psychological administrator with schizophrenia who was once a patient at the facility at which he works was the keynote speaker for the Regional Support Network [RSN]; during one of his presentations, he showed a series of five slides, each of the same object; each of the slides contained dots representing the object; the first slide had few dots and would seemingly yield itself to understanding the nature of the object; the next one had more, until, at the last, the object in the fifth slide was clearly a five dollar bill.
I couldn't figure it out until the fifth slide, but then, I was sitting in the back of the room.
But one person saw what it was in the first slide.
In the movie, A Beautiful Mind, schizophrenia is portrayed as an agent that permits Dr. John Nash to engage his talents to break code--he is able to gather and assess seemingly random data into an integration which represents... the right answer; it also may have enabled him to understand the principles which led to the development of economic theory which earned him the respect of his colleagues and the Nobel Prize.
And it was a miserable life.
He suffered from overload; in the moments of overload, his perceptions led to dangerous paranoia and delusions--delusions so powerful they were a danger to himself and his family.
Our son has schizoaffective disease, which means he has the worst elements of bipolar disease [manic-depressive disorder] and schizophrenia; after many trials and severe experiences, he has the treatment he needs and is coping with the disease; after seeing the movie, he asked if he was going to win the Nobel Peace Prize; I told him it was unlikely, though he is brilliant and at one time had a 4.0 grade point average at the University of Washington.
That's the sad thing about mental disorders: There are so many people suffering from them, many of them undiagnosed and 25% of all families in the United States has at least one mentally ill member; often there is no hope but to simply cope and people suffer, though it is not their fault.
I used to work for a man who, sadly, was both a practicing alcoholic in the final stages and has bipolar disease; he is a man with no connections and no career, but was a brilliant technologist and an effective manager in his time; we all suffered horribly from this man's disease.
A coworker had a husband and the family had various mental disorders and challenges; on September 11, 2001, he was home when he heard the news of the terrorist bombings of the twin towers in New York; he left his home, drove across the state, and apparently committed suicide; in the aftermath, he left his fifteen year old son and widow with as much as $150,000 in debt and the family in total chaos.
For all of us, there is no choice in life's journey but to pick up the pieces and live the best life we can.
We offer comfort and understanding to those who must cope with mental illness and it is the part of this ministry to offer hope and recovery to those who so desperately need it; there may be trials, but your life can be better and prosper, even in seemingly impossible circumstances.
Last updated: Saturday May 12, 2007
