By Mysia Haight, Audible Editor

A BEAUTIFUL MIND IS A REAL-LIFE LOOK AT GENIUS, MENTAL ILLNESS, AND LOVING A DIFFICULT PERSON

A Beautiful Mind, the book, explores the stigma attached to people who've struggled with mental illness. The accounts of Nash being hospitalized against his will and subjected, again and again, to a treatment he described as "torture"—insulin shock therapy, which provoked extremely violent, spontaneous seizures—are not easy reading. (Fortunately, his wife and colleagues said no to electroshock therapy for fear of numbing Nash's genius.) After his hard-fought recovery, Nash was nearly passed over for the Nobel Prize because of his history with schizophrenia. Could you give the highest of scientific honors to a man who had mental illness? Some committee members were dubious, believing that schizophrenia had transformed Nash into a different, and lesser, person. Taking us inside the secret deliberations at the Swedish Academy, Nasar reveals the controversy over recognizing Nash, with his fragile mental health, at age 66 for a theory he had conceived as an exceptionally mentally strong 21 year old. It was a fraught, contentious decision. Nash was not permitted to give an acceptance speech, contrary to the movie’s dramatic final scene. But Alicia was in Stockholm with him, supportive as always.

The true life story of John Forbes Nash Jr. is certainly stranger than the highly fictionalized screen version. Nash, unlike Russell Crowe's endearing portrayal, was a difficult man to like and deal with; he was often self-absorbed and sometimes callous. Then, there’s the mystery of how he overcame schizophrenia—purely on the strength of his mind. Nash stopped taking medication for his illness in 1970 and learned, he says, to discard his paranoid thoughts. To my mind, that's a feat as amazing as his coming up with game theory and other mathematical marvels I can't begin to wrap my brain around. Yet Sylvia Nasar celebrates John Nash for perhaps his most brilliant move—recognizing the extraordinary qualities of Alicia Larde. "It was Nash’s genius," she writes in A Beautiful Mind, "to choose a woman who would prove so essential to his survival."

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