A Beautiful Mind: a Case Study
Running head: A BEAUTIFUL MIND 1
A Beautiful Mind:
A Case Study
A BEAUTIFUL MIND 2
Diagnostic Impression:
Axis I 295.30 Schizophrenia, Paranoid Type, Continuous
Axis II V71.09 No Diagnosis
Axis III None
Axis IV Psychosocial and Educational Stressors
Axis V GAF = 55 (highest level in past 30 years)
Case Study:
John Nash suffers from Paranoid Schizophrenia. He is a gifted mathematician who began graduate school at Princeton University in 1947. We will begin Mr. Nash’s history from this point in time, for it is here that his symptoms first began to emerge. During this time in his life he is in what is known as the prodromal phase of schizophrenia, which is a period before active psychosis, during which time symptoms first appear but aren’t yet prominent or recognized. Some behavioral examples of this include Mr. Nash’s social awkwardness, his grandiosity, and his unique sensory ability (he was able to see a light pattern from a glass and synchronize it perfectly with patterns on one of his school-mate’s ties).
It is likely that the stress of this new, unfamiliar, and competitive environment is what caused Mr. Nash’s first positive symptom of schizophrenia to emerge, a visual and auditory hallucination in the form of a roommate, and later friend, named Charles Herman. Positive symptoms reflect an excess or distortion in normal behavior and experience (i.e. delusions and hallucinations), whereas negative symptoms reflect an absence or deficit in normal behaviors and experience (i.e. blunted affect, alogia, and avolition) (Butcher, Mineka, & Hooley, 2010).
For the most part, Mr. Nash remains socially isolated, not even attending class, devoting all of his time to the pursuit of a “revolutionary [and] original idea in mathematics.” His only breaks being when Charles, his hallucination, would talk him into taking a break. It is during one of these breaks that John states to himself, through the image of
A Beautiful Mind:
A Case Study
A BEAUTIFUL MIND 2
Diagnostic Impression:
Axis I 295.30 Schizophrenia, Paranoid Type, Continuous
Axis II V71.09 No Diagnosis
Axis III None
Axis IV Psychosocial and Educational Stressors
Axis V GAF = 55 (highest level in past 30 years)
Case Study:
John Nash suffers from Paranoid Schizophrenia. He is a gifted mathematician who began graduate school at Princeton University in 1947. We will begin Mr. Nash’s history from this point in time, for it is here that his symptoms first began to emerge. During this time in his life he is in what is known as the prodromal phase of schizophrenia, which is a period before active psychosis, during which time symptoms first appear but aren’t yet prominent or recognized. Some behavioral examples of this include Mr. Nash’s social awkwardness, his grandiosity, and his unique sensory ability (he was able to see a light pattern from a glass and synchronize it perfectly with patterns on one of his school-mate’s ties).
It is likely that the stress of this new, unfamiliar, and competitive environment is what caused Mr. Nash’s first positive symptom of schizophrenia to emerge, a visual and auditory hallucination in the form of a roommate, and later friend, named Charles Herman. Positive symptoms reflect an excess or distortion in normal behavior and experience (i.e. delusions and hallucinations), whereas negative symptoms reflect an absence or deficit in normal behaviors and experience (i.e. blunted affect, alogia, and avolition) (Butcher, Mineka, & Hooley, 2010).
For the most part, Mr. Nash remains socially isolated, not even attending class, devoting all of his time to the pursuit of a “revolutionary [and] original idea in mathematics.” His only breaks being when Charles, his hallucination, would talk him into taking a break. It is during one of these breaks that John states to himself, through the image of