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���������� Note: The untimely death of John Nash and his wife, Alicia, on May 23 shook individuals from many communities. His friends and family have expressed reserved devastation. The international mathematics community that revered him felt the tremendous loss to the small world of applied theory, remembering his masterful contributions. The general public mourned the image that was projected on the screen through Russell Crowe’s portrayal of him in the movie A Beautiful Mind. But, necessarily, the mental health community cannot produce a unified reaction or way to remember him. This is apt, as the complexity of any human, let alone one as brilliant and misunderstood as John Nash, should not be reduced in death. But the story of his connection to the mental health community is one emblematic of how dangerous a can be. Largely, Nash’s life and experiences were co-opted by a section of the psychiatric community that sought to define his recovery as a product of psychopharmacology. It is clear, however, that an indefinite number of sources indicate that his recovery relied more on family and community, work and perseverance, opportunities for education and personal growth, and a dynamic spirit inside a man that sought to explore, expand, and realize the world inside his imagination. But at risk of co-opting John Nash again as some symbol of the recovery movement, it’s important to let his life’s work and experiences stand unto and speak for themselves. See the excerpts below from various sources related to his life and death, and seek further information to develop a more thorough understanding of the inspiring legacy left by mathematician, husband, father, and world-traveler John Nash.

From The Guardian on 6/2/15, authored by Clare Allan:

“Although Nash’s diagnosis of schizophrenia also received much attention, not least in the film A Beautiful Mind, it is striking how little attempt has been made to understand his experience on his own terms. Instead, again and again we have seen the truth of Nash’s struggles with “mental disturbance” (his own term) sacrificed to the requirements of others, be it the Hollywood story machine or critics keen to discredit his��. According to�� in the comments on the Guardian website, “The truth about John Nash and how a paranoid schizophrenic’s warped views of human relations came to be part of major institutions is quite horrifying.” Shocking as such statements are, many people with a mental health diagnosis will read them with a sense of weary recognition.

One of the problems with diagnoses is the way in which they can be requisitioned by others to suit their purposes, even if, or especially if, those others have neither understanding nor interest in the reality of an individual’s experience. It’s one of the reasons so many people choose to keep quiet about mental health problems. And it’s one of the reasons Nash should be saluted for his courage in speaking out.

Nash expressed some reservations about the way in which his life was portrayed in A Beautiful Mind

In a 2009����with a journalist, Riz Khan, Nash expressed some reservations about the way in which his life was portrayed in A Beautiful Mind. Most significantly, he objected to the fact that in the film he is shown as remaining on medication. Indeed, in a scene set around the time of his Nobel nomination in 1994, Nash’s character, played by Russell Crowe, explicitly credits his recovery, at least in part, to newer medication. The truth is that Nash stopped taking any medication in 1970. The line is a fabrication, and a conscious��one.”

From Mad in America on 5/25/2015, authored by Robert Whitaker:

“In her book, Sylvia Nasar wrote of how John Nash, after having been treated with neuroleptics during his many hospitalizations in the 1960s, stopped taking the drugs in 1970s. She wrote:

“Nash’s refusal to take the antipsychotic drugs after 1970, and indeed during most of the periods when he wasn’t in the hospital in the 1960s, may have been fortuitous. Taken regularly, such drugs, in a high percentage of cases, produce horrible, persistent symptoms like tardive dyskinesia . . . and a mental fog, all of which would have made his gentle recovery into the world of mathematics a near impossibility.”

You see in that passage both a “fact” and an assertion. The fact: Nash recovered without the use of neuroleptics. The assertion: If Nash had taken the drugs, they would have made it impossible for him to recover. The drugs, in Nasar’s book, are presented as a��hindrance to recovery.

Why was this falsehood inserted? Nash later stated that he thought the screenwriter, Akiva Goldsman, whose mother was a psychiatrist, inserted it because he was worried about people with schizophrenia stopping their medication. However, there was also a PR trade magazine that wrote with admiration at the time about the efforts by—and my memory fails me here, by either the pharmaceutical industry or one of the patient advocacy groups—to get this line into the script.”

From NPR on 5/24/2015, authored by Scott Neuman:

“A bio on��, where Nash was a professor, notes that��A Beautiful Mind��was “loosely” based on his life. Nash received his doctorate from the institution in 1950.

According to the website:

“The impact of his 27 page dissertation on the fields of mathematics and economics was tremendous. In 1951 he joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. His battle with schizophrenia began around 1958, and the struggle with this illness would continue for much of his life. Nash eventually returned to the community of Princeton.”

In a 2004 interview with Nash published on the website of the��, the mathematician was asked how receiving the prestigious award had changed his life.

“It has had a tremendous impact on my life, more than on the life of most Prize winners because I was in an unusual situation. I was unemployed at the time,” he said.

“I was in good health, but I had reached the age of 66 and beginning to get social security, but I didn’t have much of that,” Nash said. “I had many years of unemployment before me. And so I was in a position to be very much influenced by [how] the recognition of my earlier work came about in this way.””

Learn More about John Nash’s life’s work:

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