A Beautiful Mind was a great, creative illustration of a very scary common disease. And it managed to let the viewer actually experience and observe schizophrenia from the viewpoint of the person suffering with the disease and from the family and friends viewpoint. As I watched the movie I really thought that John Nash's roommate was real, and I thought that he really worked for a secret sect of the government. It was a shock to me when I realized that it had all been apart of his imagination. So I can only imagine how shocking and difficult it had to be to him to actually live through that experience and to find out that none of it was real.
Schizophrenia is a disease that effect many people in our country. There are many types of schizophrenia including catatonic schizophrenia, which causes a person to be extremely withdrawn, negative and isolated, and causes them to have marked psychomotor disturbances. Another type is Disorganized schizophrenia, which causes the person to be verbally incoherent and may have moods, and emotions that are not appropriate to the situation. Hallucinations are not usually present. Paranoid schizophrenia is another common type, it causes the person to be very suspicious of others and often have grand schemes of persecution at the root of their behavior, and they also have hallucinations and delusions. Residual schizophrenia affects the person although the person is not currently suffering from delusions, hallucinations, or disorganized speech and behavior, but lacks motivation and interest in day-to-day living.
The causes of schizophrenia can vary. Sometimes it can be inherited. Relatives of people with schizophrenia have a greater risk of developing the illness than others. The risk is progressively greater in relatives who are more genetically similar to the schizophrenic person. Studies of people adopted in infancy suggest that the increased risk of schizophrenia in the relatives of identified cases is attributed to inheritance rather than environment.
