Thanks for sharing that clip Sarah116. Here's a few more perspectives regarding John Nash's recovery...

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The movie A Beautiful Mind, nominated for eight Academy Awards, has brought welcome attention to the fact that people can and do recover from schizophrenia, a severely disabling disorder that affects about one in 100 Americans. Unfortunately, the film fabricates a critical detail of John Nash's recovery and in so doing, obscures a question that should concern us all: Do the medications we use to treat schizophrenia promote long-term recovery -- or hinder it?

In the movie, Nash -- just before he receives a Nobel Prize -- speaks of taking "newer medications." The National Alliance for the Mentally Ill has praised the film's director, Ron Howard, for showing the "vital role of medication" in Nash's recovery. But as Sylvia Nasar notes in her biography of Nash, on which the movie is loosely based, this brilliant mathematician stopped taking antipsychotic drugs in 1970 and slowly recovered over two decades. Nasar concluded that Nash's refusal to take drugs "may have been fortunate" because their deleterious effects "would have made his gentle re-entry into the world of mathematics a near impossibility."

Source: John Nash: Recovery Without Drugs

See also: NPR: Author - Sylvia Nasar


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The film "A Beautiful Mind," about the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John F. Nash Jr., portrays his recovery from schizophrenia as hard-won, awe-inspiring and unusual. What most Americans and even many psychiatrists do not realize is that many people with schizophrenia - perhaps more than half - do significantly improve or recover. That is, they can function socially, work, relate well to others and live in the larger community. Many can be symptom-free without medication.

They improve without fanfare and frequently without much help from the mental health system. Many recover because of sheer persistence at fighting to get better, combined with family or community support. Though some shake off the illness in two to five years, others improve much more slowly. Yet people have recovered even after 30 or 40 years
with schizophrenia. The question is, why haven't we set up systems of care that encourage many more people with schizophrenia to reclaim their lives? ...

Unfortunately, psychiatrists and others who care for the mentally ill are often trained from textbooks written at the turn of the last century- the most notable by two European doctors: Emil Kraepelin in Germany and Eugen Bleuler in Switzerland. These books state flatly that improvement and recovery are not to be expected. ...

The American Psychiatric Association's newest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual - D.S.M.-IV, published in 1994 - repeats this old pessimism. Reinforcing this gloomy view are the crowded day rooms and shelters and large public mental-health caseloads.

Also working against effective treatment are destructive social forces like prejudice, discrimination and poverty, as well as overzealous cost containment in public and private insurance coverage. Public dialogue is mostly about ensuring that people take their medication, with little said about providing ways to return to productive lives. We promote a self-fulfilling prophecy of a downward course and then throw up our hands and blame the ill person, or the illness itself, as not remediable.

In addition to the Vermont study, nine other contemporary research studies from across the world have all found that over decades, the number of those improving and even recovering from schizophrenia gets larger and larger. These long-term, in-depth studies followed people for decades, whether or not they remained in treatment, and found that 46 percent to 68 percent showed significant improvement or had recovered. Earlier research had been short-term and had looked only at patients in treatment.

Although there are many pathways to recovery, several factors stand out. They include a home, a job, friends and integration in the community. They also include hope, relearned optimism and self-sufficiency. ...

Can all patients make the improvement of a John Nash? No. Schizophrenia is not one disease with one cause and one treatment. But we, as a society, should recognize a moral imperative to listen to what science has told us since 1955 and what patients told us long before. Many mentally ill people have the capacity to lead productive lives in full citizenship. We should have the courage to provide that opportunity for them.

Source: Beautiful Minds Can Be Recovered


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