Whether or not "A Beautiful Mind" takes home any Academy Awards, the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) declares the film is a winner. "Our members are the movie's toughest critics," said NAMI director Richard Birkel. "They have experienced mental illness first-hand. "A Beautiful Mind" represents a breakthrough of historic proportions. It is authentic. It speaks many truths."
"Director Ron Howard, actor Russell Crowe and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman deserve more than Oscars," Birkel said. "They deserve a prize for bridging the gap between entertainment and public education about schizophrenia." Xavier Amador, Ph.D., director of NAMI's Center on Education, Research & Practice said: "The experience of having schizophrenia is nearly impossible for the average person to grasp. The film takes you inside the mind of someone battling to separate reality from delusion. It is no small feat. The impact goes far beyond what the filmmakers ever could imagine."
Amador listed key truths from the movie:
* Dignity and respect optimize recovery.
* Many people with schizophrenia suffer from poor insight, or anosognosia, a symptom that delays getting help or keeps them out of treatment.
* Medication plays a vital role and discontinuing medication involves major risks. In the movie, Nobel Prize winner John Nash's delusions return when he stops taking medication. Later, newer medications help him, even though his hallucinations do not go away entirely.
* Faith and hope are factors for recovery. Alicia Nash (Jennifer Connelly) in the movie proclaims: "I need to believe that something extraordinary is possible." For many families today, extraordinary things happen when they have access to state-of-the-art care. Hope also endures that science will find a cure for schizophrenia.
* Community reintegration is important: i.e. what Nash (Russell Crowe) in the movie calls "fitting in, being part of a community, a certain level of attachment to familiar places" in asking for permission to "hang around" Princeton University.
* Supports and tolerance, particularly by employers such as Princeton, help recovery and can utilize the talents of people with mental illness.
* Cognitive therapy strategies, or what Nash calls "a diet of the mind," help to discipline thought processes to ignore hallucinations and not "indulge" certain emotions.
"We have made monumental advances in the last two decades, but state-of-the-art treatments and services are not as widely available as they should be." Amador said. "If they were, there would be many more 'beautiful minds' freed from prisons created by untreated mental illness and stigma." One scene in the movie has been controversial. Lying on a hospital bed in restraints in the 1950's, Nash receives insulin therapy, resulting in violent convulsions. Some viewers mistakenly believe the procedure to reflect modern treatment or electroshock therapy. "The scene is disturbing," Amador said, "but it is not the reality of treatment today."
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