John Nash's Disease

As brilliant as John Nash was at coming up with solutions, there was one problem he was never able to solve, that of his own sanity. In the 1950’s Nash’s disease first began to manifest itself in the form of Paranoia. Paranoia is defined as a mental condition characterized by delusions of persecution, unwarranted jealousy, or exaggerated self-importance, typically elaborated into an organized system. For Nash this disease manifested itself by him being under the impression that every man he saw wearing a red tie was a communist spy who was a part of a great scheme to rise up a government in the United States to take over the country. Nash even went so far as to send letters to United States embassies in Washington D.C. to warn them of the threat of these communist spies. Nash’s
He forced himself to be as rational as possible when fighting this disease by ignoring all of these voices in his head to continue his work. During an interview with PBS John Nash once said. “The consequence of rejecting the voices is ultimately not hearing the voices. You're really talking to yourself is what the voices are, but it's also parallel to a dream. In a dream it's typical not to be rational.” Just as in a dream you are not always going to make the most rational decision, living with Schizophrenia you will not always be the most rational person. Once he realized he was talking to himself, his own figments of imagination, he knew what he then had to do to be able to fight this disease, ignore is. Although this was a very hard concept to accept because these voices he was hearing and people he was seeing, had become very close to him. Patients who suffer from Schizophrenia often become emotionally tethered to the people they are imagining, as did Nash, because these people are real to