John Forbes Nash, Jr. (born June 13 1928) is an
American mathematician whose works in game theory differential
geometry and partial differential equations have provided insight
into the factors that govern chance and events inside complex systems in daily
life.
His theories are used in economics computing evolutionary
biology artificial intelligence accounting politics and military
theory. Serving as a Senior Research Mathematician at Princeton University during
the latter part of his life he shared the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in
Economic Sciences with game theorists Reinhardt and John Haryanvi.
In 2015 he was awarded the Abel Prize (along with Louis
Nirenberg) for his work on nonlinear partial differential equations.
But let’s speak about his illness.
Nash began to show signs of paranoia, and his wife
later described his behavior as erratic. Nash seemed to believe that all men
who wore red ties were part of a communist conspiracy against him; Nash
mailed letters to embassies in Washington, D.C., declaring that they were
establishing a government. Nash's psychological issues crossed into his
professional life when he gave an American Mathematical Society lecture
at Columbia University in 1959. Although ostensibly pertaining to a
proof of the Riemann hypothesis, the lecture was incomprehensible.
Colleagues in the audience immediately realized that something was wrong.
He was admitted to the McLean Hospital, April–May 1959,
where he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. The clinical diagnosis is
dominated by relatively stable, often paranoid, fixed beliefs that are either
false, over-imaginative or unrealistic, usually accompanied by experiences of
seemingly real perception of something not actually present – particularly
auditory and perceptional disturbances, a lack of motivation for life, and mild
clinical depression.
In 1961, Nash was admitted to the New Jersey State
Hospital at Trenton. Over the next nine years, he spent periods in psychiatric
hospitals, where, aside from receiving antipsychotic medications, he
was administered insulin shock therapy.
Although he sometimes took prescribed medication, Nash later
wrote that he only ever did so under pressure. After 1970, he was never
committed to a hospital again, and he refused any further medication. According
to Nash, the film A Beautiful Mind inaccurately implied that he was
taking the new atypical antipsychotics during this period. He
attributed the depiction to the screenwriter (whose mother, he notes, was a
psychiatrist), who was worried about the film encouraging people with the
disorder to stop taking their medication. Robert Whitaker wrote an article
suggesting that recovery from problems like Nash's can be hindered by such
drugs.
Nash has said the psychotropic drugs are overrated and that
the adverse effects are not given enough consideration once someone is deemed mentally
ill. According to Sylvia Nasar, author of the book A Beautiful Mind,
on which the movie was based, Nash recovered gradually with the passage of
time. Encouraged by his then former wife, de Larder, Nash worked in a communitarian setting
where his eccentricities were accepted. De Larder said of Nash, "it's just
a question of living a quiet life". I think that not everyone is given an
innate traits, and if it is then taken from the front of any one thing; This
was the case Nash innate abilities and his health took a part; Who knows if it
was not for schizophrenia then maybe he could create it and did not fight for
success.
