Why I hate "A Beautiful Mind"

Stories constitute a kind of rhetoric and one of their functions is to construct the reality in which we live. Schizophrenia defies explanation – but it is susceptible to the theories that we invent to try to explain it. If a schizophrenic comes to believe in the theory of the schizophrenogenic mother, for instance, he or she may decide to blame his or her mother; if he or she believes that the condition is caused by childhood trauma, say of a sexual nature, he or she may unwittingly invent a false memory of such trauma to makes sense of why he or she should suffer so. The Soul is malleable. Perhaps the best approach to Schizophrenia is to pragmatically devise the theory that gives the patient the greatest possible hope for recovery and a normal life, and the least possible stigma. Or perhaps the psychiatrists could actually try to establish the reasons why a person has become ‘ill’ in the first place by determining the environmental causes that provoked the first episode (such causes probably differ from person to person). This approach would be preferable to most current theories, theories that stick a terrible label on a person and which put him or her in a sealed box from which they can never escape.

I should say something first about the theory of schizophrenia that prevails today. This theory holds not that the condition is a reaction to environmental stresses but that it is a physical disease. As a result of bad genes or some such somatic agent, the psychotic’s brain overproduces dopamine; consequently the patient should ben given medication that suppresses dopamine levels. This is currently established medical wisdom. I think it’s bullshit but, then, what do I know?

Today’s post is on A Beautiful Mind, a film that is virtually unique in attempting to describe the schizophrenic experience from the inside. As such, the film takes on the significant task of elucidating the condition to a general public that knows little or nothing about it. This is a great responsibility. The protagonist, John Nash, based on a real person, is not an individual; he stands as an exemplar of all schizophrenics everywhere. Consequently, if the film propagates false ideas about the nature of madness, as I think it does, it deserves to be held to account. This is the purpose of this post. Before I begin though, I feel I should concede a small flaw in my preparation: the DVD I watched had a glitch in the middle so I have never seen the scene in which Nash is told he is schizophrenic. I have tried to rent other copies but, bizarrely, the glitch always occurs and always in the same place. I hope this gap in my knowledge won’t unduly affect this essay.

I know little about Nash apart from what I have gleaned or surmised from the film and from his Wikipedia page. I know enough, however, to be able to point out some major inaccuracies in the film. According to his Wikipedia page, Nash did not start experiencing paranoid delusions until 1958 or 1959 when he was about thirty years old; according to his own account he only began to hear voices in 1964, after six years of ‘treatment’ consisting of repeated hospitalizations, induced seizures and antipsychotics. The film, by contrast, presents Nash as interacting with his ‘imaginary friends’ as early as 1948 immediately after his acceptance into Princeton. The film also suggests that these delusional companions assumed corporeal form when in fact (and not until eighteen years later!) Nash only ever heard their voices.

Other inaccuracies in the film relate to the issue of Nash’s character. In 1952 Nash had an illegitimate child by a nurse Elenor Stier, a woman and child who don’t feature in the film at all; his relationship with his wife Alicia de Larde, moreover, was far rockier than presented in the film. He also reputedly had a couple of ‘homosexual experiences’ during his early adulthood but I am uncertain how relevant this is to his ’illness’. All of these troubling footnotes the film leaves entirely untouched. Generically, the film is tragedy-of-hubris tale and a saved-by-loved tale and the filmmakers obviously felt that including such details would spoil the picture. The facts should never get in the way of a good story.

I sincerely believe that the writers of A Beautiful Mind based their screenplay, not on the real Nash, but on a short psychiatric monograph on schizophrenia, an approach I despise because, quite honestly, I sincerely despise psychiatrists. Immediately after Nash is first institutionalized and is being given his first insulin injection, the psychiatrist tells his wife “You see the nightmare of schizophrenia is not knowing what’s true. Imagine if you had suddenly learned that the people, the places, the moments that were most important to you were not gone, not dead, but worse, had never been. What kind of hell would that be.” This statement misrepresents Nash because, as I pointed out earlier, Nash did not start experiencing psychotic symptoms until 1958, the previous year. More than this, though, it misrepresents the nature of schizophrenia itself. Paranoid delusions are rarely pleasant and, if a psychotic is fortunate enough to hear friendly voices rather than abusive ones, the fact of whether they are real or not is irrelevant.

In 1970 the real John Nash, with the consent of his doctors, discontinued his medication and gradually, over the course of several years, recovered. In the film, though, towards the end when the old Nash is being considered for the Nobel prize (around 1994) the film-Nash delivers the following short piece of dialogue to the person tasked with the job of assessing if he is fit to receive the award:  “I am [to be honest] crazy. I take the newer medications but I still see things that are not there… I simply choose not to acknowledge them.” This speech is all bullshit. The fact is that Nash didn’t take any kind of medication at all after 1970 and I would bet my life that, by the stage in his life that this scene depicts, he must have been completely free of psychotic symptoms and would never have described himself as ‘crazy’. The fact is that the real Nash believed that medication actually impeded the process of recovery. Apparently the film's director, Ron Howard, inserted this line about medication because he was worried that “the film would be criticized for suggesting that all schizophrenics can overcome their illness without medication”. In other words, the film was kowtowing to established psychiatric wisdom – whatever the hell that is.

According to established medical wisdom, schizophrenia is a physical illness that first manifests in late adolescence or early adulthood, that is chronic and from which one can never recover. According to this wisdom, the condition cannot be cured, only managed by ‘appropriate’ treatment. This is the agenda the film is trying to push. There is no questioning of the veracity of psychiatric discourse and the psychiatrist in the film gets off scot-free. The idea that inducing epileptic fits can alleviate psychosis is plainly profoundly stupid but the film effectively endorses it. (This form of treatment has, by the way, long since ceased.) Personally, I think psychiatrists are generally stupid, incompetent or just plain corrupt; most of them don’t have the foggiest idea what they are doing. Psychiatric discourse is a patch-work of sophisms but the public continues to invest trust in these people as though they are priests of an esoteric religion. As though one could draw a distinction between the diagnosis and the condition.

Obviously, I have strong views about schizophrenia. I have a theory about it – quite a good one I believe – that I worked out only today. I may write about it in a later post. Suffice it say that I believe in nurture, not nature, and I sincerely believe that schizophrenia is something from which a person can recover. So long as they receive humane treatment – as Nash plainly didn’t.

[Note, added 21 August 2016. This post is one of my popular post but it doesn't do John Nash's story  justice. About six month later I wrote a second post about Nash, "Why I Hate A Beautiful Mind Part 2". This second post elaborates further my understanding of Nash. This second post is also incomplete and is slightly tentative in its conclusions, especially towards the end, but if you have read this post about Nash I recommend you also read that other one.]