On looking up A Beautiful Mind, I noticed a large number of articles that discussed the movie’s portrayal of mental disorders. While I cannot analyze the details of the portrayal of schizophrenia, there were other aspects about mental disorders portrayed in the movie that seemed entirely plausible.

The movie’s portrayal about Nash’s diagnosis was faithful to the true series of events. It’s slightly startling to find out that Nash’s schizophrenia was diagnosed pretty late in his life, when he was 32. It is alarming that there is the possibility that mental disorders can take a long time to be diagnosed or even noticed, if they ever are. Often times, the delay or inability to diagnose mental disorders is due to issues of reliability and accuracy with methods of diagnosis.

The primary method of diagnosing mental disorders is based on the psychiatrist forming opinions about the personal accounts of a patient, and perhaps corroborating the accounts with a secondary source like a parent or a partner. The individual’s account is also analysed in relation to guidebooks like the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), that list the common conditions of disorders. The psychiatrist then makes a diagnosis based on the comparison of the paient’s account and the DSM.

Unfortunately, since this method depends on both the subjective account of a patient and the psychiatrist’s perception of the disorder, so it is often prone to a lack of reliability. A study by Cooper et al (1972) found that when watching the same videotaped clinical interviews, British psychiatrists diagnosed cases as depression while American psychiatrists diagnosed the same cases as schizophrenia.

Apart from the lack of reliability, another issue is that of accuracy. Historically, and even today to a lesser extent, the standard of mental health was/is erroneously conflated with a perceived statistical norm. Anything that was considered to be different from the masses would be regarded as ‘not normal’. For example, the DSM 1 and 2 listed homosexuality as a paraphilia and sexual orientation disturbance respectively. It was only around the late 1900s that homosexuality was removed from the DSM.

The field of psychiatry and the DSM have a troubled history. However, there is work going on to address the issues of reliability and accuracy in diagnosis. There is an attempt to study disorders from a more balanced perspective: by looking at biological, cognitive and socio-cultural aspect factors that affect mental health. Moreover, manuals like the DSM are continually being changed and updated to keep up with new findings in the field of psychology.