awesome post :-)

i met someone... who used to go to princeton around the time Nash hung around on the steps. drawing on the windows and such.

i'm not sure that he ever made a *full* recovery... but then hard to quantify *full*. after the equation (on which his fame rests) i don't think that he did much / any other work... but after you do the kind of work he did you don't much need to do any other work. mathematicians tend to peak young at any rate (as do scientists - though you get the converse in philosohy which is why people tend to turn to that later in life).

there are a lot of oddballs in academia (don't quote me on that). i think that one thing they have in their favour (typically) is increased social supports. in the sense that society gives them some esteem and their colleagues are about as odd as they are!

in the graduate program i'm in (which is quite a good grad program - not to blow a trumpet but to make the following message better): i am pretty sure it is fair to say that half of the grad students have a history of mental illness. not all of them took medication.

my supervisor forwarded me a paper the other day that i have yet to read... it is on the relationship between schizophrenia and creativity. one line of thought (currently quite a big one) is that schizophrenia is linked to creativity (which society values) and that the odd psychotic episode might just be an inevitable consequence (at a population level) of creativity :-)