The Real Life Story of John Nash
Many of you will have seen the film A Beautiful Mind. It is about a brilliant mathematician called John Nash who developed schizophrenia whilst studying at Princeton University. The art of the film (and apologies for the spoiler if you have not seen it) is in its ability to bring you along with the main character symptoms, so we the viewer experience his illness “from the inside”. In the film, Nash’s symptoms include elaborate visual and auditory hallucinations, including a hallucinated friend at Princeton, a member of the government giving him national security tasks, and a young girl.
Nash is very disturbed by these hallucinations, which he experiences as utterly real. He is intensely paranoid. In particular, his hallucinations of the member of the US government sees him obsessively reading journals, magazines and newspapers for hidden codes being sent by the Russian government.
In the film, Nash is admitted to a psychiatric hospital and given primitive antipsychotics. These interventions, however, only helps him in part and comes with side-effects, such as sexual dysfunction, and relapse.
With time, however, Nash gains insight into the unreal nature of his hallucinations. He does this by observing that the little girl he sees and hears does not age. He is then progressively able to ignore his hallucinations. The film ends with Nash receiving a Nobel prize in economics for work in Game Theory he accomplished in his early days at Princeton, and dedicating his life’s work to the love of his wife.
This is a beautiful story, but not entirely true to the facts of Nash’s life.
In life, Nash did live under the delusion that messages were being sent to him through journals, magazines and newspapers. But it is not clear he hallucinated the friend at Princeton or the little girl. His illness was more dominated by paranoia and what he described as “schizophrenic thinking”. He experienced voices at one point. He visited several mental hospitals and was given antipsychotics and insulin shock therapy. He stopped taking antipsychotics after 1970. His behaviour became more and more erratic. His illness also saw him leave his wife and travel to Paris, where he sought to cancel his American citizenship and apply with the United Nations to become an international citizen of the world.
In reality, as in the film, Nash also experienced hallucinations and delusions, with a gradual remission of symptoms as he grew older. He reconciled with his wife and returned to teaching. It is very uncommon for any person diagnosed with schizophrenia – let alone the intensely paranoid and delusional schizophrenia experienced by Nash – to achieve natural remission later in life. It is in this story, a story the film is true to in its own partial way, that perhaps carries the true message of hope we may find in John Nash’s life.
Dr. Richard Schweizer, Policy Officer at One Door Mental Health richard.schweizer@onedoor.org.au.
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Dr Richard Schweizer