Applied Psychology & Its Principles: Memory, Thinking & Reasoning

Last Name, First Name
Subject
Institution
Supervisor
Date
Applied Psychology
“A Beautiful Mind” is a movie based on a true story of John Forbes Nash Jr. Nash is a mathematical genius with a mental illness caused by schizophrenia CITATION Ron01 \l 1033 (Howard). The first symptoms of this illness are revealed as he is attending Princeton University. When Nash is working on coming up with an original idea, he begins to depict a case of delusions and hallucinations associated with Schizophrenic patients. Later in Life, Nash becomes much worse when he begins to think that he is employed by the Central Intelligence Agency as a code breaker.
Schizophrenia is a form of mental disorder which is characterized by positive and negative symptoms. The negative symptoms include lack of normal cognitive, social and emotional response as was observed by Nash while socializing with his peers at Princeton. Throughout the film John Nash was always disinterested in social engagements, he was less motivated and showed little or no pleasure of responding to the activities CITATION MZi16 \l 1033 (Zink and Englisch). This is a normal occurrence for an individual suffering from schizophrenia when the disorder enters in. In very severe cases, there can be a lot of negative symptoms, though it is not shown in the movie.
In the film, John Nash also presents some positive symptoms of schizophrenia, which include various levels of psychosis that most people with schizophrenia do not easily present. Some of these include paranoia - he believed that he was being chased by a secret agent, hallucinations - he would run away from the crowd of people when he was invited to present a speech ; he would think that the little girl and his closest friend were real only to realize that they were illusions. Most of these types of delusions are presented through his five primary senses that include vision, smell, and hearing. According to CITATION MZi16 \l 1033 (Zink and Englisch), a person suffering from schizophrenia usually has disordered thoughts that are usually present through positive symptoms. On average a person suffering from schizophrenia will experience lots of symptoms, having more positive than the negative ones. The most common of them, also often depicted in the movies are the auditory hallucinations and disorganized thoughts.
This means that a person suffering from schizophrenia will fall between different ty...