Reflections on a Beautiful Mind

Thank you for setting the record straight.

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Watching the videos of him talking stuck me as ironic….I have never heard a shrink talk with the insight and intelligence of this man….and it was shrinks that said that he was crazy.

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Thanks for this column. I have been bracing myself for a stream of media nonsense about ‘schizophrenia’ and its effects. I was contacted by BBC World Service at short notice for a comment about the mental health lessons we can learn from Nash’s life and managed to mention, in the 2 minutes allocated to me, that many prominent survivor activists have left this label behind, often recovering as he did without medication, and that current thinking suggests ‘schizophrenia’ may be an understandable response to life events and circumstances, as Nash himself also seemed to believe. It’s an uphill struggle against the dominant narratives!

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I remember 20 years ago going with a friend who drove the group home severely mentally ill to doctor appointments. One client was an attractive young man, maybe 25-28 years old, who was on massive neuroleptics. He had extensive upper body jerking and facial grimaces that made others seeing him turn away. He seemed very happy conversing with his “voices”. By writing this I wanted to show case how neuroleptics do cause extensive disfigurement and as we all know interference with abilities. I was on so many neuroleptics and to everyone except the prescribing psychiatrist saw how impaired I was on these drugs ( still don’t know how I drove a car). I know I would not be alive today if I was still poly drugged because the drugs toxic side effects ( Akathisia, muscle spams). To have my “clarity of mind” again drug free was such a gift.

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The drugs, in Nasar’s book, are presented as a hindrance to recovery… But in the movie this was all changed

Utterly amazing. Lies rarely shock me anymore but this takes the cake & should be widely exposed.

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Thank you Bob for this blog as a reminder about this “made up” story. I have told several people today at work and elsewhere and will continue to do so. This is the kind of true stories from life which has to be told again and again since they as I think actually speaks to people in common. And people in common are the ones who will change the system, together with people like you. Thanks a lot!!!!

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Thank you for this article. As I’ve re-read much of what was published about John Nash in the 90s and since, it is amazing how often the truth has been twisted to support the medical model perspective of his life. This, even though his recovery actually supports another more humanistic and hopeful perspective, one of moments of extremely difficult life experience followed by full recovery without a lifelong dependence on meds. I wonder how much the hospitalizations, meds and ECT actually delayed and interrupted his eventual full recovery.

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http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/24/us/feat-john-nash-wife-killed/index.html?sr=fb052415featjohnnashwifekilled1029aStoryLink

From the article:”Unlike Crowe’s character, who comes to rely on medication for treatment, Nash said in a 1994 interview it had been decades since he had taken medication.”

The book is worth reading. But as much as this story serves to challenge the narrative – and I am chiming in with everyone else!- it also serves as a reminder that it was a tough and long road for him and his family. Perhaps it could have been easier with a system of care who responded more emphatically but this took years to “settle” as I think his wife said in one of these accounts.

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A remarkable piece of propaganda but hardly the only one. The Oscar winning “Silver Linings Playbook” pushes the same agenda about “bipolar”.

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Please tell the “useless” “shrink” I just saw last month how John Nash recovered without drugs. I told her that I wanted no more drugs and she prescribed me risperidal because she wanted to prevent me from a relapse. What she fails to realize is how risperidal, the other anti-psychotics, the SSRIs, the very addictive “benzos” and the lithium and Depakote caused me the psychosis, ocd, and even a horrible temper beyond any I ever experienced! And, that is just the tip of the iceberg of what I have needlessly gone through! I refuse to see her again!! John Nash- recovery without the dangerous meds. I also think of a very much beloved Saint; Saint Francis of Assisi! If they had had these meds in his time; would we have ever known someone as close to Jesus as ever lived! Sometimes, I get angry; but, it does no good! I pray, walk, write, plan my new life, and thank God for truth-tellers like Robert Whittaker and the Mad in America website and the others on other websites who speak up with their stories. It is time we shelve being politically correct and stand again for our freedom! Isn’t this why we have Memorial Day today?

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There is also a deeper level of distortion going on, involving the language that Whitaker perhaps inadvertantly uses in responding to the mainstream narrative.

That distortion involves the narrative that a valid syndrome / brain disease called schizophrenia actually exists, when its reliable existence has never been proven. The case against long-term medication use would get much stronger were it to be widely accepted that the use of schizophrenia as an organizing schema is completely misleading – i.e. while there are innumerable varieties of severe emotional distress, and this distress can sometimes be relieved by brain-damping pills, there is no one illness called schizophrenia that needs long-term medication or doesn’t. The medical language used in the term schizophrenia is a powerful cudgel wielded by psychiatrists and Big Pharma to legitimize the use of powerful drugs on all manner of severely distressed people, as if the drugs were actually treating a defined medical condition. What a tragic tangle of lies: “Schizophrenia” is a ghost that only exists in people’s minds, ironically, most of all in the minds of those diagnosing it.

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Thanks so much fr clarifying all of this for me. I thought he recovered without drugs and when i saw the movie I was confused. Once again, I doubted myself for no reason.
in my small state I was at May is Mental Health Month highlight speech at a conference. The person who spoke was a peer who bought into the system hook, line, and sinker. She referenced Nash as one who took meds. I don’t get angry with folks like this anymore. I think they were caught in a trap like many of us and for what ever reason were never able to open their eyes and get out.
In the 1980’s our community mental health psychiatrist challenged us workers to take a Haldol pill. Everyone refused. The line he used was take them for two years then we will talk. However two years would come for folks and he never followed through. My understanding now is he literally didn’t know what to do.

A psychoanalyst shrink – a relative – once admitted that no one knew why meds worked on some and not others. Her quote was – “they don’t know why they sometimes work”. She left the field disgusted many years ago. I think she saw the writing on the wall and didn’t feel she was able to make any change.
This and so many other writings like Robert’s book – a g00d read – show it was just smoke and mirrors all along. Once again I though I had been wrong about my desire to try to keep myself and children away from any type of psychotropic medication.
It was only when over the top situations happened that I allowed these medications into our home. It helped out my son for awhile before I realized how right I had been.

I thought I was missing out on the new golden age. Wrong! The trouble is sometimes for what ever cruel reason some meds on some people do work for a time. That loophole has tragically allowed havoc to reign lose over the mental health field.

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A Beautiful Mind was the first movie I saw after my second hospitalization a couple years earlier. The movie was very hopeful and confirmed everything I had been told about schizophrenia. Had I read the book instead, the contradictions in the book with what I had been told may have opened my eyes to the split between what psychiatry says and logical reality. That is to say, psychiatry matches its own definition of schizophrenia much more closely than anyone it labels as “schizophrenic.” The Greek origins of the word schizophrenia even contradicts and discredits modern psychiatry, just like the term psychosomatic and the term psychiatrist itself.

Even the idea that neuroleptics are just like “drugs that fix chemical imbalances like insulin for diabetes” is quite illogical when you consider that the very concept of neuroleptics, a very accurate name, is to induce the very thing that the “drugs that fix chemical imbalances like insulin for diabetes” are trying to prevent.

I have found that the two easiest ways to argue with a psychiatrist is to ask for any valid scientific evidence to support what he is saying, or cite any other valid field of medicine. Psychiatry always fails on both accounts.

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Another relevant thing that the book covers that the movie does not is Nash’s sexuality. Obviously the movie focuses on the love story with Alicia, and for good reason. But it is also true, as Naser writes, that Nash slept with men from a young age, and had long-term relationships with some. This was at a time that being gay was dangerous for one’s career (he was fired from the RAND corporation following an arrest in his 20s) as well as for one’s life. He was bullied to the point of torture at college, as Naser writes. Knowing what we know now about the relationship of early stressful experiences, cultural dislocation, and bullying with psychosis, it seems worthwhile to consider how these stressors may have contributed to Nash’s experience.

Nash spoke of these difficulties when he told his son about his “life and problems and life history” in what he hoped to be “my personal long-awaited ‘gay liberation.’” After this revelation, his son did not speak to him for 17 years, although it’s not clear from the book whether this was because of his revelation or because, as the book says, “having a mentally ill father was rather disturbing.” In any case, the interrelationship of these facts remains unexplored. Perhaps it was out of respect for Nash’s preferences in telling his story – although this seems inconsistent with the fact that his story of his own recovery is consistently disregarded. I think it’s more likely that it was, until the mounting research on the link between psychosis and trauma as made the connection unavoidable, just not clear that the sum total of the stressors Nash might have – and probably did – experience as a result of his struggles with sexuality could have meaningfully contributed to his extreme states.

I guess it may seem disrespectful to bring this up, but I think it’s equally disrespectful not to talk about something that he clearly did care about, and remained relatively silent about, for most of his life. I personally know many people who put their sexuality – gay or straight – on the shelf once their identity became that of “mentally ill,” which in itself one of the tragedies of our current standard of care – which posits that people have to attend to “their” “illness” before they can have a relationship. My philosophy has always been – and I’ve been finding this confirmed in my recent studies of systemic couples and family therapy – that one of the best ways to help people toward health is to help them have fulfilling relationships first; and that health follows. This has become an accepted approach to working with trauma, for instance, where historically the approach has been to send people to individual therapy until they are deemed ready to have “real” relationships.

I had hoped that this would be discussed while he was alive, and that he might talk about it. It is clear from the interviews above that he is more forthcoming than the media have generally chosen to pick up on. I am sorry that we can only discuss this in retrospect. But out of consideration for all the people who may find this other unrecognized fact of Nash’s life resonant with their own, I am glad to be able to bring it up now.

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Coming late to this discussion, I have to say that the reason for the lies about Nash’s “recovery” (if that is the right word) is the money spent by the drug companies in bribing doctors directly and the media indirectly (through the dependence that the media now have on drug advertising).

At least we have Nash’s own statements of the truth to point to, as Bob Whitaker says. But I think we are going to have to go a lot further than comment and talk to make any progress.

Last weekend, people in 25 cities in 9 countries held coordinated protests against shock treatment. It’s time we started doing actions like this, just like every other movement for human rights has done.

We can do this! And we will.

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Yeah there are movies that are pro-drug-psychiatry Shutter Island is another one.

The latest one is probably “The Voices” with Ryan Reynolds, basically where the protagonists entire reality changes to a ridiculous degree based on whether he takes a pill or not.

To be fair though there’s also a tonne of movies that don’t paint psychiatry in a good light either. I haven’t seen Silver Linings Playbook or Side Effects but apparently they aren’t exactly pro-psychiatry to name a few.

I generally try to avoid any movie that involves psychiatry, unless it accurately shows how full of crap it is, then maybe.

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Here is another interesting post ‘John Nash has left the building’ on the UK Mind Hacks blog:
http://mindhacks.com/2015/05/25/john-nash-has-left-the-building/

Which talks about RD Laing and game theory:

“Fast forward 50 years, and Nash’s ideas finally have begun to have an impact on the science of psychopathology. After A Beautiful Mind was released, based on Sylvia Nasar’s earlier biography, studies emerged applying game theory and the Nash equilibrium to understanding the psychology and neuroscience of schizophrenia.”

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As a person who also has a “beautiful mind,” I can tell the story of my life and dreams in the lyrics of music, so I believe in a collective unconscious. I appreciate your pointing out that neuroleptics do not cure beautiful minds, they destroy them. In my case, neuroleptics caused the “schizophrenia” symptoms.

And I wonder if, perhaps, most so called “schizophrenics” aren’t actually just people wrongly put on a neuroleptic, who are suffering from either neuroleptic deficit syndrome or the central symptoms of neuroleptic induced anticholinergic intoxication syndrome. I think psychiatric misdiagnoses of these neuroleptic induced syndromes as “schizophrenia” are the likely most common cause of so called “schizophrenia.”

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Neuroleptics and other psych drugs can interfere with one’s ability to do arithmetic, let alone the complex mathematics accomplished by John Nash. I have firsthand experience in this from having been prescribed Seroquel as a sleep aid.

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I was sorry to hear about John Nashs passing away. I’ve seen him being interviewed and I thought he was a very interesting and vibrant person (his photographs didn’t do him justice).

He was very old and he didn’t die from ‘natural causes’. I think he’s a good example of non drug recovery.

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UGH! The whole move was a falsehood!!! read the book and you will understand. The movie did not show the real way his mental illness manifested itself. The movie only focused at the mid-part of his life when he was “ill”. I wish it would have shown his earlier years so people could understand just how brilliant he was. He won a Nobel prize for game theory, but his work in partial differential equation and topology (including solving the folding problem for manifolds in 4d space) advanced fields beyond math, such as engineering and physics.

Dr. X

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Okay, we survivors and allies of survivors have the facts on our side; we also have, in large part, a correct analysis of the power wielded by our opponents. What we lack is serious discussion of effective and appropriate strategies and tactics to get our point of view into public consciousness. Here are just a few of related thoughts to consider as starting points: 1) An effective strategy will have to avoid mimicking actions more appropriate to other interest groups, with other issues, fighting other stereotypes, under other conditions. 2) Other oppressed interest groups were defined either by nature (women, African-Americans, LGBTs) or by economic circumstances ( farm workers, the very poor). By DEFINITION, the interest group of psychiatrically diagnosed people has been CREATED by outside parties granted respect and authority based on public belief in their expertise and claims based on “medical science.” Without the fearless support of professionals (academics, mental health practitioners, and respected journalists) “mental patients” defined (by SCIENCE, no less)) as irrational, inconvenient, unpredictable, and potentially violent, standing in small numbers on street corners “demanding” rights without the ability to produce compelling consequences should their demands be ignored, are hardly figures likely to attract public respect and sympathy. Related to the foregoing the public, media, courts , and entertainment industry has only rarely been moved by tales of harm imposed upon diagnosed mental patients who have “required” control and detention. So, 3) What might move such groups (media, courts etc.) might be evidence that psychiatry does not perform the roles assigned it by society, i.e., not only to “help” the “afflicted,” but also to control the “insane.” For example, there appears to be evidence that folks who shoot up schools, theaters,and military bases have in large measure been recipients of psychiatric treatment and psychoactive drugs. But how to get that info into the mainstream media? The MindFreedom sponsored Fast for Freedom of 2003 opened a crack in the door by creating a crisis (a hunger strike) supported by credentialed mental health professionals. The film, Where’s the Evidence?: A Challenge to Psychiatric Authority describes that effort and is available through the MIA store. Much of the thought behind the tactic was well described in a blog by John Carney written for the MIA website about three years ago.

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Thank you for writing this important article Bob.
I remember a local Northern California chapter NAMI president telling me that NAMI had successfully lobbied the makers of the movie to have Nash’s character say he recovered because of the new antipsychotics- that if the movie producers dared to truthfully show he recovered without meds that they would have blood on their hands- because some people diagnosed with schizophrenia would commit suicide without their meds.
Nami has successfully used this same fear-mongering strategy to lobby every level of elected politicians to now have forced in-home treatment in 45 states and to push forward the second Murphy attempt to make forced community treatment the law of the land.
Michael

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Hi Michael
“…some people diagnosed with schizophrenia would commit suicide without their meds…”

I think they’re more likely to commit suicide with their meds.

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Ever since I learned of John Nash’s death last week I have been ranting about the distortion in the movie. I, however, did not put pen to paper. So thank you, Robert, for writing this.
I first saw the movie as part of an evening study/support group for people who were working as peer supporters. Many of us were disturbed by the movie distortion but we certainly had a very memorable and enlightening discussion spurred on by this movie. One aspect of the movie that has nothing to do with medication but points to an essential ingredient for transformation is relationship. There is a real soul mate love story here. It was sad to lose Alicia and John Nash–I personally take some comfort that they left together. That may just be me romanticizing, but I won’t apologize for that. I do think that if we could move the system to use relationship that we would have a kinder and certainly more effective system. Another aspect has to do with the work. John Nash continued to do his work–paid, unpaid–it was who he was. And yes medication likely would have dulled that so thank goodness he just had the strength and creativity to keep doing his passion. So many others have lost hope because of the messages they have received. This conversation is so important. Again thanks for writing this.

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Dr. Whitaker, do you ever wonder if you are, unintentionally, discoraging people from seeking help?

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I was diagnosed with ADHD a couple of years ago at age 53. I feel fortunate that due to my high blood pressure I wasn’t able to be prescribed adderall right away. I started producing a documentary on ADHD partly as a way to force myself to find out what kind of treatments are available. I have met people who seem to have been greatly helped by drug treatments and others who feel they were victims of Big Pharma greed.

I went from believing stimulants were my best chance of managing ADHD to realising we must be much more educated about as consumers when choosing treatment. My documentary will be treatment agnostic due to what I’m learning as I research for the film. Thank you for another enlightening article.

Wes Gray
Are You ADD? A documentary.
areyouadd.com

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