Another side of John Nash's 'Beautiful Mind'
Nobel Prize-winning mathematician and game theorist speaks about schizophrenia at Fuller Seminary
By Carl Kozlowski 02/09/2012
As one of the world’s leading mathematicians, Dr. John Nash has not only won a Nobel Prize for his groundbreaking advances in game theory but has also been the subject of both the classic bestselling biography “A Beautiful Mind” and the Best Picture-winning film adaptation of the same name. Yet Nash has accomplished all this while living with a severe case of schizophrenia that derailed his life for decades before he learned to control it and establish himself as a top professor at Princeton University.
Wednesday through Friday, Nash will speak in Pasadena as part of Fuller Seminary’s School of Psychology’s symposium “Schizophrenia and Human Flourishing: Science, Service, Community and Church.” He will comment on the film “A Beautiful Mind” at a 7:30 p.m. Wednesday screening before speaking at the symposium’s closing banquet dinner at Pasadena’s Westin Hotel Feb. 17.
Those appearances are a major coup for the conference, which will attempt to address how a committed combination of faith, values and science can contribute to the healing process of people living with schizophrenia and other mental illnesses. The symposium will also feature one of Nash’s best friends, Dr. Richard Josiassen, among the three days of speakers. A research professor of psychiatry at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Josiassen discussed his long relationship with Nash in a phone interview with Pasadena Weekly.
“I’ve known Nash personally for 10 to12 years, and when he first went to Princeton as a young man, there was speculation that he would take the position that Einstein had,” says Josiassen. “He had recommendation letters calling him a bona fide genius, he got his PhD in two years at Princeton, and he solved major equations that eluded others and became the basis of game theory.”
Indeed, the impact of Nash’s work in advancing game theory has been massive, with his “Nash’s Equilibrium” calculations expanding its application in the fields of everything from math to politics to military planning as it offered an overarching means of considering how human beings negotiate in an endless array of situations. Yet, Josiassen also recalls the devastating impact schizophrenia had on Nash as well.
“The problem was, he became quite ill shortly after earning his PhD and he dropped out of sight, wandering around Princeton as a ghostlike presence,” recalls Josiassen, who is also the chief psychiatric officer of the private research facility Translational Neuroscience. “And he was basically homeless. When he was given the Nobel Prize in 1994, he became a really remarkable figure, because here we have a man suffering from what most people think of as a death sentence and like a psychiatric cancer, and yet he thrived at the highest possible level.
“He became a symbol for at least our culture that we need to elevate our sights higher when people have this illness,” Josiassen continues. “He became an interesting important figure in that regard.”
Josiassen met Nash at a psychiatric conference in Phoenix, at which both men shared a dinner with their respective wives. That meal came before the 2001 release of “A Beautiful Mind” and the attendant explosion of attention surrounding Nash, but Josiassen says Nash has adjusted to being on the world stage surprisingly well.
“I invited him to give a talk at a great big psychiatric hospital I worked at, to introduce himself to the psychiatric community here, and we’ve done other things like NPR interviews,” says Josiassen. “He was nervous about going to the Oscars, because he had heard that Academy people could be tough to people who were outsiders, and he asked me to go, but he ultimately went with his wife. All the filmmakers acknowledged him at the Oscars and he was put on camera, too.”
With Nash front and center at two of the symposium’s events, this weekend should prove to be educationally fruitful for those eager to learn about dealing with and caring for schizophrenics. The gathering is intended to provide information and better understanding of the illness and ways to provide better and more effective treatment. It also aims to show how religious congregations can provide support to schizophrenics and their families.
Fuller Theological Seminary’s School of Psychology presents “Schizophrenia and Human Flourishing: Science, Service, Community and Church” from Wednesday through Feb.16 at 180 N. Oakland Ave., Pasadena. Call (626)584-5500 or visit fuller.edu/symposium.
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Now, let me get this straight, religious organizations can help schizophrenics control their own more insubstancial problems of relating to the real world?
I saw the "Beautiful Mind" movie. As I understood it, Nash was overcome by his own fantasy world of "invisible friends." What makes that any different from Christianity's (or all Noahide religions for that matter) insistence that there is a multi-personalitied super-sky-being watching over all of us (much) more mortal types and is always there by our sides to witness our slow devolutions to the grave?
Ultimately, religion is a whole complex culture of little angels standing on our shoulders, along with their more underworld counterparts, stuggling for our souls. And some people actually do "see" these imaginary creatures you know. As the old saw goes, "When I talk to G_d it's prayer ... if G_d talks back to me, it's schizophrenia."
So, Mr. Nash has learned how to control (or at least, ignore) his own imaginary demons of self-destruction. In a most graphic way, he's learned how to tell the difference between the substancial world that our senses can experience and that which is fundamentally unreal. One thing I can tell you, I wished he would develop an effective education program that would effectively instruct the religiously more insane radicals of America's government currently working out of Capitol Hill how to ignore those deific little voices making dominionist noise in their heads.
Maybe then we could better avoid the religiously hysterical war of nuckear apocalypse currently being aimed at Iran.
DanD