A Beautiful Mind: What Did John Nash Really Have?

It is a commonplace that John Nash, the Nobel-Prize winning mathematician and economist who recently died, had “schizophrenia.” All his obituaries repeat the formula, and the assumption of the book about his life and the subsequent movie, “A Beautiful Mind,” leave this assumption unchallenged.

But did he really have schizophrenia?

2 Likes

Interesting. But the article admits:

"Nash was certainly delusional and evidently hallucinated as well. He filled the blackboards of Fine Hall at Princeton with indecipherable scribblings, and wandered about the campus in an apparent daze. He became known as “The Phantom of Fine Hall.”

Doesn’t sound like, e.g. the flu.

While some valid points are made in the article, taken together, they seem incoherent to me. The main argument seems to be that ‘schizophrenia’ does not designate a single disease and it is therefore meaningless to attribute ‘it’ to anyone, for there is no such ‘it’. From such an argument, the conclusion should thus apply to anyone that is diagnosed with schizophrenia, not just Nash. This is at odds with claims that Nash was not a real schizophrenic, as opposed to others. I take the argument from denotation in itself to be a flawed argument, for there are many words that do not have a single denotation but are meaningful nonetheless. But even if we accept the argument, it would be meaningless as well to assert that Nash did not have schizophrenia, for that presupposes the term to be meaningful in the first place.

I found the fact that he was affected in his thirties maybe tells us that his brain had finished developing and so he may have been affected by the use of some hallucinogens or some other cause like we know that some people develop schizo related symptoms form PTSD and other diagnoses.

Does this mean that I might not be a genius after all. hahahahaa

Yes, that’s like saying there are five or six forms of diabetes so x athlete probably hasn’t got it. The fact that you don’t expect an athlete to be diabetic is an expression of your preconceptions, nothing more. So the writer doesn’t think Nash had sz. Why? Could it be bcs the writer doesn’t think a person with sz can win a Nobel Prize? And what about Nash’s son? He is known to have paranoid sz.

The writer misses out the same bits of Nash’s life as the film does. There was a very long period in his life when he was in a very bad way and his wife left him. And in fact, it does happen that sz abates in many people in their fifties. I read that in cases where it is an autoimmune disorder, either the body finally learns to recognize itself or the actual immune system weakens with age so some people with sz finally “emerge” in the way Nash did.