What We Learn From “A Brilliant Mind”

John Nash, the life and math genius who inspired the fantastic film A Bright Mind, passed away this year.

Based on the book of the same name by Sylvia Nasar, the feature film produced in 2001 was a true success that won four Oscars and countless followers. Starring Russell Crowe, the film offers us a great message that invites us to find a way to overcome our limitations, whatever they may be.

For those who don’t know the story of John Nash…

John Nash was 30 years old when he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. The healthy ambition of his privileged mind imposed on him the burden of a terrible disease that was ravaging him.

It was a brilliant and outstanding mind when it all happened.  However, nothing stopped him from pursuing his dreams. After years of bloody treatments trying to help him overcome his mental illness, John Nash managed to remain symptom free.

His inner work was, of course, staggering to the end of his days. Logically living without being able to discern what is real and what is not was very complicated;  however, Nash’s brilliant mind succeeded.

Nash won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1994 for his game theory, still valid and useful in the field of strategy. John has battled paranoid schizophrenia his entire life. And, yes, it did. They managed to lead a life completely different from what their illness meant for them.

His death, like his life, was not expected.  On May 23, 2015 Nash died, along with his wife, in a traffic accident.

Example of resilience and hope

We owe him a lot, not only for his contribution to science, but for telling us his story and returning “to the world of the sane” to teach us that, working from the inside, all minds are brilliant.

John clung to his intelligence and lived with the voices in his head, despite being smothered by them. Your fight was not easy. However, he was able to understand that the path of his life was in acceptance, and he showed us that.

Then inspiration hit him. He managed to create a stable world in a changing place. Despite his limitations, Nash landed a position as a professor at MIT, while, in turn, regaining the shine his mental problem had tried to erase.

John Forbes Nash learned to  live with schizophrenia  throughout his life by applying a rule that “every problem has a solution” . Something that, although not valid for all mentally ill, can suit many lives in some way:

Living knowing that much of our pain is inevitable should be a premise we should all follow. No doubt John has given us the key to enjoying life: accepting, flowing, and acting.

Is schizophrenia curable or not?

Investigative journalist Robert Whitaker says that, for a long time, Western Lapland (Finland)  had the highest rates of schizophrenia among its population. To give you an idea, some 70,000 people live there, and in the 1970s and early 1980s there were twenty-five or more new cases of schizophrenia every year, double or triple that in the rest of Finland and Europe.

However, Yrjö Alanen arrived at the psychiatric hospital in Turku (Finland) in 1969. At that time, few psychiatrists believed in the possibility of psychotherapy as a treatment for psychosis.

So they  began to listen to patients and their families. They created a new treatment modality called  “Therapy Adapted to the Needs of Patients”. However, they did not forget that each person is a world and, in turn, they encouraged the creation and adaptation of specific treatments for each case.

Some patients would have to be hospitalized, but others would not. Furthermore, some patients could benefit from low doses of psychotropic drugs (anxiolytics or antipsychotics) and others not.

Thus, as we can see, they personalized and worked in a meticulous way in each case, becoming aware of the needs of each person and each family. Of course, decisions about treatment were joint, valuing each opinion to the appropriate extent.

The therapy sessions did not revolve around the reduction of psychotic symptoms, but focused on the patient’s previous successes and achievements, thus seeking to strengthen control over his life.

Over the past few years,  Open Dialogue therapy has transformed the  “picture of the psychotic population”  in Western Lapland. Spending on psychiatric services in the region has dropped enormously and is currently the sector with the lowest expenditure on mental health in all of Finland.

What is clear is that things can be done differently. There are other types of treatments for people with schizophrenia or other psychoses that guarantee a different life than we are used to providing them.

We 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 looks we attribute to them. If we add that up, we can put a hand in the fire for failure. And we don’t get burned.

So remember, there are always better ways to go. 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 everyone.