Treating ‘a mind on strike’

If Nobel laureate John Nash is a spokesman for those who experience mental illness, he is a reluctant one.

The pioneering mathematician, whose battle with schizophrenia inspired the 2001 film, “A Beautiful Mind,” is at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena this week for a symposium about the disease. Nash’s contribution is founded on personal experience, not the objective scientific thinking for which he’d rather be known.

“I’m here because I was invited. I’m not exactly a Mormon missionary, going on a mission like Mitt Romney was some while ago,” said Nash, 83. He described his role as a featured speaker as “just giving another perspective … not lecturing about what is right or wrong.”

Nash’s views are colored by a disdain for the mind-altering medications that physicians and patients use to control and treat the disease. He hasn’t taken such pills since the 1970s, yet his symptoms have subsided.

Nash’s jabs at religious faith also are counterintuitive to Fuller’s 42nd annual Integration Symposium, which includes faith- and science-based approaches to dealing with schizophrenia. The event ends tonight with a keynote address by Nash at the Westin Pasadena hotel.

Nash is living proof that schizophrenics can lead productive, fulfilling lives, said Richard Josiassen, a symposium organizer who earned his doctorate in clinical psychology from Fuller.

“He shows us that we can set our sights a little higher in the mental health community, and maybe as a culture, for what we should be expecting as outcomes for this illness,” said Josiassen, a researcher at Drexel University in Philadelphia and longtime friend of Nash.

Improving the quality of life for schizophrenics is a primary concern for Nash and his wife, Alicia. Their adult son, Johnny, struggles with the condition, but has earned a Ph.D. in mathematics.

In 1950, the elder Nash published a doctoral dissertation at Princeton University that established the “Nash equilibrium,” an innovative concept in game theory that won him the 1994 Nobel Prize in economics. Nash was committed to a mental hospital in 1959 after extreme fits of paranoid delusion and then faded into obscurity for years before returning to academic prominence.

“It seemed as if there was some sort of ultra-science by which, before the time of cell phones … it seemed as if I was getting a call, like a cell phone call, that I would just hear in my ears,” said Nash. “Later I realized I was talking to myself.”

Nash described mental illness not in terms of an affliction, but as a “mind on strike,” analogous to a worker in a factory.

“Society comes in, maintains the striking workers in a certain category — you get unemployment compensation,” he said. “It’s more economical if [the mentally ill] get drugs every week than if they get a session of psychoanalysis. But the interests of society are different from those of the family of the individual. The family really wants him to do good work.”

Nash believes that rather than “a patient [being] given drugs and observed,” a person with schizophrenia should be placed in “a structured environment that may favor the patient to behave better.”

Josiassen said that exploring the interaction of science and society, including faith communities, is the purpose of the Fuller symposium.

“That’s always what drives the care, sort of an economic and cultural decision,” he said. “You have a whole population deemed as dangerous, frightening people, and they hardly have any spokesperson to represent them.”