NR326 Mental Health Nursing: A Beautiful Mind

A Beautiful Mind Movie
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Introduction
A Beautiful Mind is one of the movies that have made the headlines not only in the United States, but also globally. A Beautiful Mind is a fascinating an American movie that is based on the life and health of John Nash, who is one of the celebrated economists and a Nobel Laureate. The director of the movie is Ron Howard, and it was adopted from a screen play written by Akiva Goldsman. The lead actor in the movie is called Russell Crowe alongside others like Ed Harris, Paul Bettany, Adam Goldberg, Juddy Hirsch, and Christopher Plummer that are playing supporting roles. The movie starts with Nash as a graduate from the University of Princeton (Nasar, 2011).
This paper explores the movie called A Beautiful Mind and its relation to the mental health.
History of John Nash Illness
The story began with Nash being a graduate student from the Princeton University. Right from the beginning of the film, Nash starts to develop a paranoid schizophrenia and has had to endure delusional series, and is painfully watching the burden and loss his condition brought to his wife Alicia and friends. The world’s renowned mathematician and economist John Nash, who lost his life out of a car crash was widely known for his long struggle with a condition known as schizophrenia, a condition that has been conspicuously or famously depicted in Oscar-winning film called A Beautiful Mind. Concerning the schizophrenia condition that Mr. Nash was diagnosed with, there have been many that have been developed around Nash’s life and health. Several scholars and experts have tried to analyze. Mr. Nash had always been known to a person who is a bit eccentric or odd. Prior to his experience with the condition of mental illness, he was also known as narcissistic person. Nash was described by mostly his fellow students as a person who liked to brag a lot about his achievements and always wanted people to know how smart he was. Nonetheless, he had actually achieved a lot prior to his diagnosis with the condition in1959. He began to show some peculiar behaviors before he was even diagnosed with schizophrenia. The epitome of his symptoms appeared to have begun in1958, when he showed publicly during the New Year’s Eve party being dressed like a baby, and was almost naked other than a diaper and a sash around his neck. Apart from dressing like a baby, he was also seen with a bottle of milk and spent the better part of that day sitting on his wife’s laps. The moment after these childish activities, he started telling his colleges in the mathematics department at MIT that he was getting messages from powers from outer space or better still from the foreign governments through The New York Times and these messages that were encrypted were only meant for him and no one else could encode them (Weiden, 2002). These were signs that he was developing a mental illness that was later discovered to be paranoid schizophrenia. He developed this condition when he was 30 years old, but when Nash was around 50 years old, the condition started recuperating around 1980’s. Mr. Nash was quoted as saying that he emerged from being an irrational thinker, purely without medicine, except through the natural hormonal changes due to aging. Additionally, it is important to note that previous studies that had been conducted in 1930,s before the medication had been discovered about 20% of patients with schizophrenia recovered on their own (Nasar, 2011).
The Current Diagnosis of Schizophrenia
Currently there are six systems for diagnosing schizophrenia and are categorized in terms of their reliability, comprehensiveness, specificity, predictive validity of each system used. However, it is quite unfortunate because neither of these systems has developed a constructive validity. It has therefore been concluded t...