A Beautiful Mind


John Nash

You don’t get to 73 years of age without meeting a number of people with mental health issues because 1 in 4 people will suffer sometime in their lives. Anxiety, depression, bi-polar disorder, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, and borderline personality disorder are some of the illnesses that people are living with. Mostly we walk past people in the street completely unaware of their lives and needs but sometimes we get into conversations when those suffering from mental health issues open up to us. I have found that all the people with these illnesses have one thing in common. They want to get well or at least manage their illness, so they can have a normal and productive life. To me, these people are brave in an unacknowledged way.
In 1959, John Forbes Nash the famous mathematician began showing clear signs of mental illness and spent several years at psychiatric hospitals being treated for paranoid schizophrenia. After 1970, his condition slowly improved, allowing him to return to academic work. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics and his life and recovery were the basis for the film, A Beautiful Mind, starring Russell Crowe.  In the film, when two men were sent to speak to Nash about accepting the Nobel Prize, his first question was, ‘Are you real?’ He then went on to explain that he still heard and saw people who weren’t there but had largely learned to ignore them. In one line he had summed up a lifetime of working with and facing his demons. The enormity of his success minimised in that simple line but one is left in awe of his achievement.

Comments

  1. David RyanJanuary 4, 2020 at 9:33 AM

    Sometimes extreme intelligence coupled to vivid and furtive imagination can cross over into illness. It's a fine line between the two so shouldn't be treated as unusual if that line gets crossed now and again.

    ReplyDelete

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