In The Guardian, Clare Allan recalls the objections of the recently deceased John Nash to the way the movie A Beautiful Mind suggested that antipsychotic medications helped him. He stopped taking any psychiatric medications for good in 1970, she writes, and often expressed how important it was for him to find his own balance between conventional and unconventional thinking.
Allan writes, “In a biographical essay, written at the time of his Nobel win, Nash described sanity as a form of conformity, and one about which he maintained a degree of ambivalence. ‘So, at the present time, I seem to be thinking rationally in the style that is characteristic of scientists,’ he wrote. ‘However, this is not entirely a matter of joy, as if someone [had] returned from physical disability to good physical health. One aspect of this is that rationality of thought imposes a limit on a person’s concept of his relation to the cosmos.’”
Don’t use John Nash to promote the use of anti-psychotic drugs (The Guardian, June 2, 2015)
