Psychological Diagnosis of John Forbes Nash - Movie Review Example

Contextual Analysis. John Nash, being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, greatly affected his behavior as abnormal. He was often seen acting as if talking to somebody while alone. He also often caught behaving as though he was in an unexpected commotion. All of these were courtesy of the delusion he had established in associating while hallucinating with characters he alone can see. His hallucinations dealt with characters he has been seeing and dealing with since he was studying at Princeton University, to the period where he was hired in delusion by the fictional top secret agent that led to the severity of his illness as it harmed himself and the people concerned with him.

In his early college life, mild depression set-in due to his low self-esteem and frustrations, and made him succumb to his mathematical prowess and abstract conversational disturbance. Critical Clicks or Stereotypes. A Beautiful Mind was based on the biography written by Sylvia Nasar, John Nash's personal biographer. The film presentation has obviously presented Nash's period of struggles into a fairytale resolution in the end, in compliance with the standard movie runtime. Many factual events and information were clearly omitted and the story was capsulated into a psychological click of a common cause of schizophrenia paranoia.

Executions of the film where Nash was in the delusion of the climactic commotion of death-defying incidents were portrayed impossibly through the film if to consider the people and places he could have been where delusion took place. Naturally, he will appear as somewhat lunatic in the places he has been, and action response might have come easier, and the diagnosis of his illness will never be executed as dramatic as it was portrayed. The real hospital, McLean Hospital, where John Nash has been confined primarily was even named differently in the film.

An expert psychological film critique, Roland Atkinson (1999) in A Psychiatrist Film said about Nash's real that "The problem lies in the nature of the symptoms: complex, outrageous thoughts, and false perceptions. The latter include voices, typically disembodied from visual human forms and emanating from the spatial hemisphere behind the patient, odd tactile sensations (often sexual), and unpleasant odors. Visual phenomena tend to be shadowy, ill-formed, darkly diaphanous. How on earth is a filmmaker to get such things down for the viewer to see The only realistic means is to show the behavioral correlates of these experiences."