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Comment by giantg2 | Hacker News Reader

Isn't this a main idea in the film A Beautiful Mind?

If rates of psychosis are going up, why? It seems very worrying when rates of depression, suicide, psychosis, and other mental illnesses are increasing with what seems like no understanding of why or what to do to prevent the increase.

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I was just researching John Nash. In the film, he takes antipsychotic medication because the film producers didn't want to encourage people to not take their meds. In real life, he never was on antipsychotics and learned to live with his disease.

And to some extent, Brian Wilson (of Beach Boys fame). Who has told that his voices are mostly negative, but sometimes also a positive force. But in any case, apparently he learned to live with them since his onset in the mid 1960s.

Schizophrenia often feels like extremes. You experience supernormal heightened states of terror and beauty in a roughly 9:1 ratio.

I thought of the same film, and in the film (if I remember correctly) the John Nash character in the end even uses the same strategy to deal with the hallucinations. To paraphrase, he says something like, he sees them but he knows they are not real, and choses not to listen.

(Oh, and of course, am not saying this is the only strategy for dealing with psychosis, but it is just that it was also the first thing that came to mind when I read this article:)

By coincidence I re-watched that film this weekend (I like it a lot) and seeing this article immediately made me think of it. Yes, in the film he takes meds, but he stops doing it after a while because of the side effects (impotence amongst others). Then he learns to live with the voices.

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