Schizophremia

Schizophrenia is a serious mental problem, especially if you are one of the people who have developed it, and don’t know it. They think they are living a normal life, when slowly their brain is deteriorating.

    People only talk about the mental alteration that happens to the brain as a person deals with Paranoid Schizophrenia, such as the fact that they hear voices that other people can’t, believe others can read their minds, control their thoughts, or are plotting to harm them in some way, shape, or form. We don’t ever ponder about the fact that the brain actually goes through a physical change.

    Tissue in the small area of the brain begins to deteriorate and moves through the brain like a wild fire, destroying more tissue as the disease worsens in life. You first lose ten percent of the brain’s tissue in the parietal regions, which spreads to the rest of the mind over a five year period. Those who go that long without treatment receive symptoms like hallucinations, delusions, bizarre and psychotic thoughts, hearing voices, and depression. It is often confused with split personality or multiple personality, and affects only one percent of Americans.

    The Auditory System in the brain causes the hallucinations. Our Occipital Lobe enables us from interpreting complex images, recognizing motion, and reading emotions on other people’s faces. When damaged by Schizophrenia, it can also contribute to hallucinations and paranoia as well, and can lead to motor side effects. When the Frontal Lobe is ill- treated, it can direct to difficulty in planning and organizing thoughts we may be having at the time. The Limbic System, which involves our emotions, plays a role to the fact that people get agitated when they develop this sickness.

    Schizophrenia started back in 1878 when Emil Kraepelin combined catatonic and paranoid disorders together. Schizophrenia is a blend of withdrawal from society, paranoia, rambling and incoherent speech, and limited movement and expressions. Those are the basic symptoms of people with this disorder, although it does vary from person to person.

    John Nash is an incredible example of someone with Paranoid Schizophrenia. He begins as a normal person, attending the University of Princeton as a mathematical genius. He is a very observing man, making a mathematical problem out of almost everything he sees, but he is also very antisocial. Nash keeps to himself most of the time. Spending most of his time solving equations he thinks must be solved; it leaves no time to socialize. In the autobiography, “A Beautiful Mind”, John meets a man named Charles who said to be his roommate. Thinking that Charles is a real person, he learns to get used to him being around and they begin to bond.  Once he is told that his record holds to placement, John gets upset and tells himself that he can not fail. He then begins a journey of proving that 150 years of economics are wrong, and is told that if he can demonstrate it, he’ll have any placement he wishes to receive. During this journey, Nash goes through a series of obstacles with the intention of showing he is a genius. He is asked to do several assignments such as break codes for a detective named William Parcher, solve the mystery of when the Russians will release the bomb on the United States, and he even teaches a class at the University for a while.

In this expedition, John finds out he is a Paranoid Schizophrenic, but he does not believe it. He thinks that the men at the psychiatric hospital are Russian spies trying to get information out of him. What about the fact that William told him not to say anything about what he was doing, and therefore he didn’t. I think that it is interesting that the mind can make us do things like that. We can see regular people that we think are there, when they simply aren’t. This takes me into thinking about when young children are playing in there rooms and you notice that they are talking to someone, when no one is there. We tend to think it’s just an imaginary friend. Is it creativity or are we all hallucinate in a way? I think we are.

Scientists today now suspect that Schizophrenia is caused by an infection in the brain by a toxoplasma parasite. Carried by cats and farm animals, it can also be transferred by eating raw meat and buying meat that is not processed correctly. But they also say that it lowers your IQ, which obviously wasn’t the case with John Nash, who probably had one the highest IQ’s. It has also been seen passed down by genetics. They found out years down the road that John’s son also developed Paranoid Schizophrenia.

John somehow managed to live his life without going completely insane because of his illness, and I think that he only did it because of his wife, Alicia, who stuck by his side the whole time. The movie showed that Nash took medication, while web sites say that he did it without the medication. I believe that he was probably on a small dosage of a medicine, but learned to get through it on his own. I went through depression a few years ago. I was in a deep state of depression for almost three years. No one would help me, others only seemed to make it work, but I was antisocial, straight “A” student, who wouldn’t even talk to her own family, and I came out of it some how. I was not given medication for it, because no one believed that there was something wrong with me. I was suicidal, and was almost put into a psychiatric hospital, but was told I could not go at the last minute. The only thing is, I knew that there was something wrong with me. None the less I still got over it, and to this day, I am still trying to figure out why.

Which brings us back to John; he is a genius, and without his delusions, will no longer be the intelligent person that he is. The mind is truly beautiful, just like the title of the movie, “A Beautiful Mind”. The mind shows us strange phenomenon’s that we will never be able to figure out in our day of life. The mystery of it is, that’s what keeps us questioning; it keeps us wanting more. People like John Nash who has such an extra ordinary disease, like Schizophrenia, who sees objects and living organisms that just aren’t there, is extraordinaire.