Kailong CaiProfessor Lisa HornibrookPSYC 101-06NApril 28, 2018A Beautiful MindWhen I saw the word schizophrenia, my first feeling was that the disease was very far away from me. It was a disease that could only be seen in movies. But when I was investigating online, I found that 1 percent of people in the world suffer from schizophrenia. This number really shocked me.After investigation on the Internet, it is known that the clinical symptoms of schizophrenia are complex and diverse, and may involve aspects such as perceptual sensation, thinking, emotion, will and behavior, and cognitive function. Individuals have large differences in symptoms, even if the same patient is in different stages or the illness may also show different symptoms.
The symptoms of schizophrenia fall into three categories: positive, negative, and cognitive. Positive symptoms including hallucinations, delusions, thought disorders (unusual or dysfunctional ways of thinking) and movement disorders (agitated body movements). Negative symptoms including “Flat affect” (reduced expression of emotions via facial expression or voice tone), reduced feelings of pleasure in everyday life, difficulty beginning and sustaining activities and reduced speaking. Cognitive symptoms including poor “executive functioning” (the ability to understand information and use it to make decisions) and trouble focusing or paying attentionproblems with “working memory”.
CITATION Sch16 l 2052 (Schizophrenia, 2016)The etiology and pathogenesis, treatment and prevention of schizophrenia have been the central topic of psychiatric research. The traditional medical model emphasizes the etiology of biology. According to this view, schizophrenia is a disease of unknown cause. Because, since the discovery of pathogenic microorganisms, people are used to treating the causes of various diseases as a single factor. If a single cause cannot be found, they are considered to be “unexplained.” However, this traditional concept has changed and is reflected in the changes in the disease model since the 1970s, from the original biomedical model to the bio-psychological-social medical model. This means that for most diseases, its onset does not depend solely on a single factor, and whether or not the disease is also determined by the person’s mental and physical conditions at the time, and these are closely related to their environmental conditions. In terms of schizophrenia, some researchers believe that it is also caused by a combination of many factors.
The results of population genetics show that schizophrenia belongs to a multi-gene inherited complex disease with a heritability of 60% to 80%. Therefore, genetic factors are the most likely quality factors for schizophrenia. In addition to genetic factors playing an important role in the cause of the disease, the psychological stress of the environment and the impact of physical diseases has always been an important aspect of the etiology of the disease. Many materials indicate that schizophrenia is related to psychosocial factors, but no psychological factors have been found to determine the occurrence of schizophrenia.John Nash’s symptoms of schizophrenia are positive, and in terms of thinking disorders, Nash suffers from delusions.
It is specifically a secondary delusion that is greatly affected by the logical barriers of thinking. Nash will have some strange associations and logical reasoning about things and people around him. He is an enthusiastic mathematician and he has injected his passion and obsession into everyday life.
Through the film’s description, I found that Nash suffers from delusions in terms of thinking obstacles. Delusion is one of the most significant symptoms of schizophrenia. For observers, the delusional content is very bizarre, indicating that the patient is disconnected from reality.
Common delusions include exaggeration of delusions, feelings of control, victimization, relationship delusions, and physical delusions. Exaggeration is a belief that is very important to the individual. Nash is a mathematical genius in the film. He has gained a certain reputation and successfully cracked the password at the Pentagon. However, he is not satisfied with the generals’ gratitude for their lack of enthusiasm.
So Pachel of the Ministry of Defense emerged and committed to him a project concerning the lives of 150,000 people. Nash feels that he is the hero who saves the nation from danger. This is Nash’s exaggerated delusional performance. In addition, Nash is still delusional. Strictly speaking, when he first accepted Pachter’s task, he was always worried about the loss of the information. Every time the abandoned warehouse was sent out, it was worried that someone would follow and looked nervous. After an illusionary gunfight, Nash thought that his job of deciphering the spy code for the National Security Bureau was exposed, so he became more tense and he would always pay attention to whether or not the people around him had come to grab himself.
Until at a university lecture, several psychiatric hospital doctors actually came to “catch” his hospital, he ran away with desperation. The idea of ??implicating is that some people or things have special significance to individuals. Like Nash, he firmly believes that all the newspapers and magazines in the United States have hidden state secrets that concern the lives of 150,000 people, and only he can see it. The ordinary news and advertisements that ordinary people think appear to be choreographed into a series of passwords in Nash’s eyes and have some unknown connection. This is the performance of Nash’s delusions.
In terms of sensory disturbances, Nash’s most prominent performance is hallucinations. Hallucinations are illusory sensory sensations in which the sensations perceived by the patient do not really exist. It usually occurs when the consciousness is completely awake. The content of the hallucinations in real life is weird. It has both auditory hallucinations, visual hallucinations and touch hallucinations. Hearing hallucinations are true and their voices are clear. They mainly deal with instructions and threats, and they also have good aspects that are beneficial to themselves. Nash was able to hear his three “prototypes” – roommates, little girls, and Pachel.
Roommate’s encouragement and joke, the girl’s innocent laughter, and Pachel’s threats and orders. Each one will make Nash feel real. In one of the climaxes of the film, Nash began to experience hallucinations because he stopped taking drugs. He even nearly heard the orders of his roommate and Pachel to kill his wife. Visual illusions let Nash see the three people that did not exist, and continued for more than 30 years, until Nash won the Nobel Prize has not disappeared, can only do nothing but see.
In addition to these three “prototypes”, there are still some scenes that are the result of Nash’s visual hallucinations. Such as the fierce gun battle, Pachel has taken him to visit the secret work base twice, and so on. Even when Nash once saw the “roommate” because he stopped taking medicine, he told his wife that the roommate was injected with invisible blood, so people couldn’t see him. Only he could see it. As far as touch illusion is concerned in the film, he felt the touch inductance and pain felt by NSA staff when he implanted a chip into Nash’s arm. That feeling should be so real that when Nash was in the mental hospital, he even had to use a blade to find the chip to prove that he was really true.
In the film, Nash does not take the initiative to participate in activities, often in meditation; not contact with the surrounding people, closed doors closed, unruly, solitary, out of reality. At the same time, it is accompanied by some stereotyped, mechanical, non-practical movements and postures, such as the rigid head and fear in the film, and the protection of the bag. These are the manifestations of the Nash will behavior disorder.Based on the above disease analysis, the clinical type of Nash schizophrenia, paranoid schizophrenia, can be deduced. Paranoid type is also known as paranoid type.
Delusions and hallucinations are the main symptoms of this type. The paranoia of paranoid schizophrenia can gradually develop around a central idea and may initially be logical. However, as the disease progresses, the delusional structure can become loose and not tight, and the content is more ridiculous and not fixed.
. This is roughly in line with the birth and development of Nash’s delusion in the film. In the beginning, Nash was naturally placed in the cover of the National Security Bureau.
However, as we continue to deepen, accidents such as murders and gun battles have emerged, and delusions are no longer strict and they become ridiculous.References BIBLIOGRAPHY John Nash. (2017).
Retrieved from Living with Schizophrenia: https://www.livingwithschizophreniauk.org/john-nash/Ph.D., E. S. (2015, May 27). A Beautiful Mind: What Did John Nash Really Have? Retrieved from Phychology Today: https://www.
psychologytoday.com/us/blog/how-everyone-became-depressed/201505/beautiful-mind-what-did-john-nash-really-haveRachael Rettner, S. W. (2015, June).
How ‘Beautiful Mind’ Mathematician John Nash’s Schizophrenia ‘Disappeared’. Retrieved from LIVESCIENCE: https://www.livescience.
com/51058-schizophrenia-recovery-john-nash.htmlSchizophrenia. (2016, February). Retrieved from National Institue of Mental Health: https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/schizophrenia/index.shtml
