John Nash, the genius of life and mathematics who inspired the fantasy film A Brilliant Mind, passed away this year.
Based on Sylvia Nasar’s book of the same name, the feature film produced in 2001 was a true success that won four Oscars and countless followers. With Russell Crowe, the film offers us an excellent message that invites us to find a way to push our limits, whatever they may be.
- John Nash was 30 when he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and his privileged mind’s healthy ambition imposed on him the weight of a terrible disease that ravaged him.
He was a bright and prominent spirit when it all happened, yet nothing prevented him from pursuing his dreams. After years of bloody treatments that tried to help him overcome his mental illness, John Nash managed to stay symptom-free.
He learned to live with voices and his hallucinations, John heard voices, saw things?But he knew how to take care of him.
His internal work was, of course, excessive until the end of his days. To live logically without being able to discern what is real and what is not very complicated; however, Nash’s brilliant mind succeeded.
Nash won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1994 for his theory of games, still valid and useful in the field of strategy. John has been batting paranoid schizophrenia all his life. And yes, it is. He managed to lead a completely different life from his illness.
His death, like his life, was not as expected. On May 23, 2015, Nash died with his wife, who was involved in a traffic accident.
We owe him much, not only for his contribution to science, but for telling us his story and for his return to the world of the healthy, to teach us that, working in ourselves, all minds are brilliant.
John clung to his intelligence and lived with the voices in his head, though he was suffocated by them. Your fight hasn’t been easy. However, he managed to understand that the way of his life was in acceptance, and he showed it to us.
Then his inspiration struck him. He managed to create a stable world in a changing place. Despite his limitations, Nash got a professorship at MIT, while regaining the brilliance his mental problem had tried to erase.
John Forbes Nash has learned to live with schizophrenia his entire life by applying a rule that “every problem has a solution. ” Something that, while not valid for all people with mental illness, can adapt to many lives in one way or another:
Living knowing that much of our pain is inevitable must be a premise that we must all follow. No doubt John offered us the key to enjoying life: accepting, sinking and acting.
Sometimes what a person needs is not a brilliant mind that speaks to him, but a patient heart that listens to him.
According to investigative journalist Robert Whitaker, Western Lapland (Finland) has long had the highest rates of schizophrenia in its population. To get an idea, some 70,000 people live there, and in the 1970s and early 1980s, 25 or more new cases of schizophrenia occurred every year, double or three times that of the rest of Finland and Europe.
However, Alanen arrived at the psychiatric hospital in Turku, Finland, in 1969. At the time, few psychiatrists believed in the possibility of psychotherapy as a treatment for psychosis.
Alanen thought the hallucinations and paranoid delusions of schizophrenic patients, when carefully analyzed, showed stories that made sense.
Then they began to listen to patients and their families, they have created a new treatment method called ‘Patient-appropriate Therapy’, however, they have not forgotten that each person is a world and, in turn, have encouraged the creation and adaptation of treatments for each case.
Some patients need to be hospitalized, but others don’t. In addition, some patients may benefit from low doses of psychotropics (anxiolytics or antipsychotics) and others may not.
Thus, as we see, they customized and worked in detail in each case, being aware of the needs of each person and each family. Of course, treatment decisions were joint, trolling each opinion to the appropriate extent.
The therapy sessions did not revolve around reducing psychotic symptoms, but focused on the patient’s past successes and achievements, thus seeking to strengthen the control of his life.
In this way, the patient does not lose hope of being like others, of maintaining normality and of being able to see beyond rather than isolating himself.
In recent years, has open dialogue therapy changed?psychotic population? in Western Lapland. Spending on psychiatric services in the region has been significantly reduced and is now the sector with the lowest mental health spending in finland.
The 25 new cases of schizophrenia per year have become only 2 or 3 cases per year.
What is clear is that things can be done differently. There are other types of treatments for people with schizophrenia or other psychosis that guarantee a different life than we are used to offering them.
Let us subject patients to aggressive drug therapies, electroshocks and compassion, a lot of compassion, let us not forget the pity, fear and contempt that fill the eyes that we attribute to them, if we add that, we can set fire to failure. we don’t burn.
So, remember, there are always better ways to act, however, if as a society we feel sick, we will not be able to see that there is a wonderful light at the end of the tunnel for all.