Ted Kaczynski had schizophrenia just like my business partner's brother who was studying electrical engineering at Cal Tech when he developed schizophrenia.
The only difference is my business partner' brother is usually aware of the fact that he has schizophrenia. About 50% have this awareness and 50% have anosognosia which prevents them from recognizing their mental illness.
In both cases they develop increasingly elaborate theories about the world based on delusions which are in no way connected to the real world.
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John Forbes Nash, Jr. was a famous award winning mathematician, best known as the central character in the film "A Beautiful Mind". In his late twenties he became convinced all men who wore red ties were part of a communist conspiracy to manipulate his thinking and his wife described his behavior as "erratic". - en.wikipedia.org.
Nash's psychological issues crossed into his professional life at age 31 when he gave an American Mathematical Society lecture at Columbia University in early 1959. Originally intended to present proof of the Riemann hypothesis, the lecture was incomprehensible. Colleagues in the audience immediately realized that something was wrong. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia based on his paranoid, persecutory delusions, hallucinations, and increasing asociality.
Nash described his own process of change "from scientific rationality of thinking into the delusional thinking characteristic of persons who are 'schizophrenic'. For Nash, this included seeing himself as a messenger or having a special function of some kind, of having supporters and opponents and hidden schemers, along with a feeling of being persecuted and searching for signs representing divine revelation. During his psychotic phase, Nash also referred to himself in the third person as "Johann von Nassau". Nash reported that he started hearing voices in 1964 and would come to understand that random items in newspapers were a special message to him revealing a vast global conspiracy.
Nash's paranoia intensified and he could no longer work. After resigning his M.I.T. post, he went to Europe, wandering from city to city. He feared he was being spied on and hunted down and he tried to give up his United States citizenship. His wife and colleagues began to receive postcards with odd messages, many concerning numbers. "I rode on bus No. 77 today and it reminded me of you," one read. After US Embassy employees returned Nash to the United States he spent most of the next 20 years, Mr. Nash divided his time between hospitals, Roanoke and, increasingly, Princeton.
After a prolonged period of involuntary commitment in mental hospitals —"enforced rationality", Nash began to engage in a process of consciously rejecting the voices he heard and the "special insights". Upon doing so, he was temporarily able to return to productive work as a mathematician. By the late 1960s, he relapsed.
Eventually, he "intellectually rejected" his "delusionally influenced" and "politically oriented" thinking as a waste of effort. The voices and "special insights" still manifested themselves but he chose to ignore them. He hoped in time his son who also developed schizophrenia would come to be able to ignore his delusions as he had. So far that has not happened.
In 1995, Nash said that he was not able to realize his full potential as a mathematician due to nearly 30 years of mental illness. |
