A brilliant madness: more about John Nash of Beautiful Mind (the film)

Below is the full documentary from The American Experience about John Nash from the film A Beautiful Mind.  Underneath that video I’ve included a cut and paste of another post which includes more commentary and  two more videos of him in an interview where he reveals he only very briefly took medications and ultimately recovered med-free, contrary to what the story in the movie A Beautiful Mind told. Once you see the American Experience, it’s clear that many things were left out or changed in  A Beautiful Mind. Not terribly surprising for Hollywood.

He also had a much more bumpy road once diagnosed than was revealed in many ways in the film including insulin coma “treatment”, which is also not really made clear in the film from what I remember. It’s truly amazing anyone recovers at all after such barbaric care. We continue to “care” for such people in crisis in barbaric ways today. See That’s Crazy. See also: About ECT a review of Linda Andre’s book: Doctors of Deception: What They Don’t Want You to Know About Shock Treatment

Of note: John Nash healed with the help of loving friends and family. Not by virtue of anything that was imposed upon him by psychiatry and also, as he put it, that his recovery was an act of will. His own.

—

The previous post with an interview with John Nash:

The film A Beautiful Mind was about John Nash. There is some commentary about this film on Beyond Meds written by Bruce Levine. It’s worth reading. The story told in the movie was changed from the real events to create a politically correct view of mental illness being that one must take psychiatric drugs for the rest of one’s life. John Nash, instead, only took drugs for a brief period during crisis and then lived the great majority of his life without psychotropic medication.

I’ve posted the below videos before and since it seems to me the blog is forever getting new readers I’m posting it again. This is an important topic since John Nash is now one of the most famous “schizophrenics” alive and the public was lied to about his condition in the blockbuster movie.

John Nash in the below video says explicitly he never used psychiatric drugs again after an initial period of crisis and the movie was purposely misleading because the screenwriter’s mother was a psychologist enamored with psych meds and feared people would go off their meds if they knew the truth. Horrifying, isn’t that?

So, John Nash recovered from what is often labeled schizophrenia. The fact is there are countless others who also recover every day and are simply forgotten — the system and those who support long-term maintenance psychotropic drug use denies they were ever sick if they are mentioned.

But this is untrue. People recover and move on from such crisis all the time. There is a long list of such folks who share such stories here on Beyond Meds.

Unfortunately, at this juncture in history many people who get labeled with psychiatric illness these days do not have the opportunity for recovery because they are encouraged to stay ill by a system that stops psychological growth by use of excessive psychotropics. This over-use of medication also kills people. The average life-span of people taking these medications is 25 years shorter than people who do not take these drugs. The drugs cause a long laundry list of problems only some of which are diabetes, obesity, heart conditions and a shrinking brain.

Many others become chronically ill like me with the medical establishment not even recognizing the damage the drugs wreak. Psychiatric drugs are neurotoxins and they harm in numerous ways. I have a brain injury among many other problems. See here for more recent discussion and links of the sorts of issues people in protracted withdrawal face.

We need to realize there is great reason to minimize drug use and expect that most people can heal significantly enough to rarely if ever need psychotropics at all in the long run.

________________________________________________