HSP3M – Movie Worksheet ANSWERS: A Beautiful Mind
Chapter 5: Mental Health and Mental Illness
1. Define and explain the term schizophrenia. Refer to your text or the Royal
Ottawa Hospital website.
Schizophrenia involves a breakdown in the experience of reality, thinking and
emotions. A person with schizophrenia often hears voices, experiences delusions
and hallucinations and may believe their thoughts, feelings and actions are
controlled or shared by someone else. Other symptoms include emotional flatness,
lack of facial expression, inability to start or finish activities, speech that is brief
and without content, a lack of pleasure or interest in life and other symptoms in
common with depression and other mood disorders.
POINT FORM:
 Altered reality, thinking and emotions
 Hallucinations & delusions
 Emotional Flatness & Depression
 Social awkwardness
 Paranoia
 Lack of pleasure or interest in life
 Dealing with your first episode is critical.
2. “I don’t much like people and they don’t much like me”. Comment on John
Nash’s statement by using examples from the film.
 Socially awkward- acts superior toward others, hard to relate to and
make connections with, in his own world, paranoia scares people away,
unpredictable outbursts.
 Nash was pre-occupied with his own thoughts, a loner, concerned with
theories and not social relationships.
3. Nash begins to find patterns where no patterns exist. Explain this statement.

Building conspiracy theories related to codes – based on his reaction to
the Cold War environment, saw patterns in everything due to his
preoccupation with numbers.
4. John Nash is an intensely unsociable man. Prove this statement with three
examples from the film.
i) His wife finds out that his best friend is a figment of his imagination. He has no
true friends.
ii) Eating and working alone at Princeton (in the library as opposed to being with
his peers in the faculty lounge)
iii) As a young professor he talked down to his students and didn’t respect them
5. Alicia is deeply disturbed by two of her husband’s activities. Elaborate.


Newspaper clippings all over his office – “Top Secret Code
Breaking”delusion
He almost drowned his son by accident in the bathtub – one of his
delusional characters was “baby sitting”
6. Write about the two delusional characters. How did Nash learn to cope with this
aspect of his illness?
Charles – “roommate and best friend”
Lucy (Charles’ Niece) – 6 yrs old
Agent Parker – “government agent that recruited Nash for top secret code breaking
assignments
He reasoned that since Lucy did not age, that she was not real.
He could sense his delusional characters, but then could consciously ignore them and
they would drift away.
7. What are some ways that John Nash reacted negatively to treatment of his
schizophrenia?


He fought against his psychologist
He stopped taking his medication
8. Nash’s behaviour deeply affected or negatively impacted a number of people. Choose
three and elaborate.
i) Colleagues were wary and suspicious. They stayed away from him and rarely
interacted with him
ii) His wife left him repeatedly
iii) He didn’t have a strong early relationship with his son. His son also copes with
schizophrenia