A beautiful mind movie- Schizophrenia

A Beautiful Mind Movie-Schizophrenia
Student’s Name
Professor’s Name
Name of the institution
Schizophrenia in A Beautiful Mind
The movie, A Beautiful Mind has helped many to understand better the psychological disorder of Schizophrenia. It talks about a man who develops the disorder at the age of 31 years and the mental breakdown he goes through. Schizophrenia is a psychological disorder that affects how patients perceive, feel, and think (Tandon et al., 2013). The main characteristic symptom of this brain disorder is psychosis like getting delusions which are false beliefs that are fixed and hallucinations with voices. This paper talks about the research about Schizophrenia and describes in detail the disorder by applying it to the character John Nash in the movie A Beautiful Mind.
Explanation of the Disorder
Diagnosis criteria
The DSM-5, (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition) indicates that a patient experience not less than two common symptoms of schizophrenia so as to meet its diagnosis criteria (American Psychiatric Association 2013). The symptoms are, negative symptoms, catatonic or disorganized behavior, disorganized speech, hallucinations and delusions. Among the symptoms, there must be one of these; disorganized speech, hallucinations, or delusions. Disturbance signs must be persistent and continuous for not less than six months. During this period, the patient must have at least a month –or less when treated successfully- with occupational or social deterioration challenges that happen over a period of time that is significant.

These issues must only be attributed to this condition and not to another in the health of the patient.
Explanation of the Symptoms
The signs and symptoms are categorized into four domains which are mood symptoms, cognitive symptoms, negative symptoms and positive symptoms. With mood symptoms, the patient is usually depressed, and seems sad or cheerful in ways that are hard to understand. The cognitive symptoms of a schizophrenic are the neuro-cognitive deficits that he goes through. Examples are deficits in functions that are executive like being able to abstract and organize, and in working attention and memory. Schizophrenics also do not easily understand subtleties and nuances of relationships and interpersonal cues. The negative symptoms include tremendous inertia such as loss of drive and interests, speech poverty, and emotional range decrease. Lastly, positive symptoms are psychotic symptoms, like hallucinations, which usually are disorganized behavior and speech, delusions and auditory.
Etiology of Schizophrenia
What causes schizophrenia is not yet known. There are however most likely not less than two sets of factors that increase the risk; prenatal and genetic (American Psychiatric Association 2013). Also, socio-environmental factors that are not defined may be the cause of schizophrenia in ethnic minorities’ urban populations or international migrants. Old paternal age is also thought to increase the chances of getting schizophrenia.
Genetic factors might be valid causes because there is more risk in biologic relatives of schizophrenic and not in adopted one. According to Ripke et al. (2014), n first-degree schizophrenia relatives, there is a 10%. A child of schizophrenic parents has a 40% risk of getting it. For monozygotic twins, there is about 50% schizophrenia concordance and 10% for dizygotic ones. Disruptions in the genes of RGS4, AKT1, KCNH2, DTNBP1, NRG1 and DISC1 are thought to increase the risk of getting schizophrenia. In this disease, many rare genetic variants result in one clinical outcome. For people with no family history of schizophrenia, it is possible that new mutations might be the cause.
Prenatal factors are also valid because malnourished mothers or those who have some viral illnesses in their pregnancies have a higher risk or getting children who later become schizophrenic. For example, according to Frith, (2014) there is a high rate of the disorder in children of malnourished Dutch women during the Second World War. Also, there were many schizophrenic of women who got influenza in their second trimester after the 1957 A2 epidemics influenza in Scandinavia, England and Japan. Also, obstetric complications are associated with the disease because children born during the winter season are usually at a higher risk of developing it.
In addition, drug use might be to blame. Leucht et al., (2013) insists that heavy marijuana intake by 15 – 17-year-old teenagers hastens the onset of the condition of psychosis in many people that have a high peril of becoming schizophrenics.
Prevalence/ Incidence rates
Generally, it has been estimated that the worldwide schizophrenia lifetime prevalence is about 1% (American Psychiatric Association 2013). Prevalence in developing countries is significantly lower than in developed countries. Also, immigrants in developed countries are highly affected.
Usually the onset of schizophrenia is between late teen and 30s. The peak for men of the first episode is mid 20s and late 20s for women. The first five years are hard to deal with but later the patient is usually stable. Negative and cognitive symptoms are harder to remit than positive ones. There are no positive identifications of the disorders prevalence of racial differences although some ethnicity and race variations have been reported.
Prognosis
Cases of full recovery of schizophrenia are rare. Poor prognosis is associated with prominent cognitive symptoms, structural brain abnormalities, family history of the disorder, and its early onset. It is however better for people in developing countries. A course of waxing-and-waning is normally followed by symptoms and they might change in nature overtime. Usually, there are fair results in positive symptoms of antipsychotic medication. Other types of symptoms are very persistent.
This disorder presents vocational difficulties which make it hard for patients to cope with poverty. The patients might have even difficulties in getting medical care and have difficulty controlling it, or get incarcerated for usually minor offenses or become homeless.
Schizophrenics have a higher risk of suicide by 5%. Their high mortality rates are also contributed to by lifestyle issues like medication complications, poor medical care, not exercising, poor nutrition, and cigarette smoking.
Summary of the Movie
The movie A Beautiful Mind is the story of John Forbes Nash, a renowned mathematician, who had the psychological disorder, paranoid schizophrenia. It is based on a true story and the character is played by Russell Crowe. Nash began his career as a graduate student doing mathematics at Princeton University. He concentrates mostly on coming up with a revolutionary equation in the subject. The movie, however, shows that most of the situations and places that are in the movie are only illusions in his beautiful mind. He has imaginary characters in his head such as Charles Herman, an English literature student and his roommate. After getting diagnosed, he is put under medication which he eventually secretly stops taking because of their side effects. He relapses but decides to deal with the symptoms without medication with the help of his wife. He eventually gets the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic for having come up with the game theory and other professors honor him.
Diagnosis of John Nash
Many symptoms prove that Nash has schizophrenia. He is in a world of imagination, hallucinations and mystery. He created Parcher, Marcee, and Charles in his head and he talks to them. These people are so real in his head such that he even relies on Charles to look after his baby and wonders why Marcee never becomes older even if he has known her for years. He also creates situations such as the locating and stopping a Russian bomb.
I am of the opinion that the movie does not accurately portray the schizophrenia disorder in all matters. I would give Russell Crowe a thumbs up for doing a great job of bringing out the behaviors and mannerisms of a schizophrenic. The movie, however, fails because it takes many liberties with the realities of medicine. For example, John Nash stops taking the anti-psychotic drugs because he does not like their side effects. He instead uses his force of will to get a handle on the conditions and it works well for him. In reality, however, the use of willpower only does not work. People suffering from schizophrenia need a combination of therapy, family and friends’ support, and medications to heal. Also, it’s only a fifth who completely recover.
In addition, John Nash has more visions than voices in the movie. He sees people who do not actually exist and talks to them. Although this makes for glitzy moviemaking, it is not what many schizophrenics go through. Instead, they get besieged by voices from thin air. People who get visual hallucinations usually see distorted things that are almost like cartoons and not so lifelike like the ones are shown in the movie.
Treatment
There are many available treatments for schizophrenia that are mixed with therapy. Various approaches are used so as to less the severity of symptoms or their return. There are nine main approaches of therapy which are, self-help groups, social and community support, individual psychotherapy, family education, cognitive behavioral psychotherapy, rehabilitations, psychosocial treatments, anti-psychotic medicine, and medication treatment.
In the film, treatment was demonstrated in various approaches. Nash was first admitted into a psychiatric facility and was given anti-psychotic medications. These helped to reduce symptoms such as delusions and hallucinations and he functioned efficiently in life. He, however, suffered from side effects and became unresponsive and lethargic and secretly stopped taking them. In addition, he was also given insulin shock therapy in the middle of the movie. Later, he used willpower to deal with his condition (Frances, 2016).
For Nash, I think the most successful treatment plan should have included the full use of anti-psychotic medications, psychological treatment, rehabilitation, and cognitive behavioral psychotherapy. Psychosocial treatment and rehabilitation could have helped him to have better social functioning in his job, at home, in the community, and at the hospital. He would have had better relationships, motivation, self-care, and communication skills with this form of therapy. Cognitive therapy, on the other hand, would have helped him to learn new adaptive ways of acting and thinking. Behavioral therapy is good for helping one to perform effectively by focusing on the important things in life.
Conclusion
The movie A Beautiful Mind is about a great mathematician, John Nash who is schizophrenic. He experienced severe hallucinations and delusions which are symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. The disorder is thought to be caused by genetic and prenatal factors and mainly affected people of between teenage years and 30s. Films does a great job in showing how people with the condition behave but is misleading in it discouraging of taking of drugs. The condition has many different forms of treatment such as therapy and medication but only a few get fully cured.
References
American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (DSM-5®). American Psychiatric Pub.
Frances R., Glen, L., (2016). Schizophrenia. Medscape. Retrieved 12/8/2016 from http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/288259-overview#a5
Frith, C. D. (2014). The cognitive neuropsychology of schizophrenia. Psychology Press.
Leucht, S., Cipriani, A., Spineli, L., Mavridis, D., Örey, D., Richter, F., & Kissling, W. (2013). Comparative efficacy and tolerability of 15 antipsychotic drugs in schizophrenia: a multiple-treatments meta-analysis. The Lancet, 382(9896), 951-962.
Ripke, S., Neale, B. M., Corvin, A., Walters, J. T., Farh, K. H., Holmans, P. A., & Pers, T. H. (2014). Biological insights from 108 schizophrenia-associated genetic loci. Nature, 511(7510), 421.
Tandon, R., Gaebel, W., Barch, D. M., Bustillo, J., Gur, R. E., Heckers, S., & Van Os, J. (2013). Definition and description of schizophrenia in the DSM-5. Schizophrenia research, 150(1), 3-10.