Insight and schizophrenia: The case of "A wonderful mind"

I affirm, without fear of being wrong, in the past of life. that solution that apparently appears from nowhere and that solves the problem that we have been thinking about for days and even weeks.

The idea is the experience or the ability to understand or realize the intimate structure of a problem or conflict. But its concept is not so simple, diverse authors like "a moment of exceptional experience", "a unique and outstanding experience in which the two puzzle pieces that respond to its place" or "a moment in which A problem so far not resolved, finally find a way out ".

However, very little is known about the processes that accompany insight. In psychiatry, the term of the mind began to be used at the beginning of the last century in order to indicate the moment in which the person who was a carrier of some mental pathology, had knowledge and recognition of their condition and the symptoms were abnormal phenomena, products of a disease

However, this understanding was lost in time and the incorporation of the concept of knowledge in the world of Scientific Psychology was related to cognitive processes; Knowledge was cognitivized, if the neologism allowed me.

However, in the 1950s, researchers Reid and Finesinger rescued the relationship between insight and mental illness by asking whether the absence of insight could be responsible for symptoms and mental disorders.

Precisely this type of knowledge was what characterized Jonh Nash, the mathematician who inspired the world famous psychological film "A brilliant mind". What is synthesized: Nash is a brilliant mathematician who has a problem with paranoid schizophrenia with delusions about supposed conspiracies and encrypted messages; See the spies that persecuted and believed the victim of cryptocomunistas.

As you can imagine a decade going in and out of psychiatric hospitals testing from drug therapy to electroshock. However, although the drugs control their symptoms they also get dull in the mind. Then, a mathematical theory that earned him the Nobel Prize in Economics.

How to control hallucinations? From a process of knowledge, learning to differentiate reality from their pathological fantasies.

I remember when I saw the film for the first time it was time and this type of knowledge was very interesting to me, especially since I was just studying the subject of Psychopathology. As you can imagine, with the curiosity of what I have noticed, and immediately, I went to find explanations.

Can a psychotic person be aware of his state? In theory, no, the psychological text is maintained because the person loses contact with reality which indicates that he does not have a critique of his pathological state.

Nash then enters the scene to clarify that the film has several licenses to tell his story, including the fact that he never had hallucinations. But beyond the artistic licenses, the truth is that in cases of recovery of psychotic knowledge are not few. The same Carl Gustav Jung took into account the occasion. The idea that schizophrenia is a chronic mental illness today has been left behind. This is how, at the end of 2004, the Administrative Services for Mental Medicine and Substance Abuse of the EUA identified ten levels oriented to the recovery possibilities of this disorder:

Direct and make decisions for your own recovery

Individualize recovery and focus it towards yourself.

Have the capacity to make decisions

Cover the different aspects of your life

Accept that it is a progressive process

Assess the strengths of their abilities.

Support each other in other patients

Get the respect of the community

Take responsibility for your care and recovery process

Encourage hope that the problems you face can be overcome.

However, we can also perceive the essential aspects for the restoration of schizophrenia based on a process of essential knowledge that is understood as the awareness of the state of the disease. As it has been said encouraging in the future of long-term studies on schizophrenia around 50% of people with this pathology meet the objective criteria of recovery.

However, only a small percentage of people achieve this recovery. Then, life is not rosy, but intercalary periods of bipolarity usually occur