Can a disease like this just go away on its own? The famous mathematician John Nash, a Nobel laureate in economics, claimed that his condition improved significantly over the years, and without medication.
John Nash, who tragically died in a car accident on May 23, 2015, suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, which is characterized by delusions and hallucinations. His years of struggle with illness is depicted in the 2001 Academy Award-winning film A Beautiful Mind. Symptoms of schizophrenia first appeared in Nash in the 1950s, when he was in his thirties. By that time, he had already managed to achieve brilliant success in mathematics, making a significant contribution to the development of game theory. The disease manifested itself as inappropriate behavior and paranoid delusions. Over the next decades, he was treated several times in a psychiatric clinic and took medication, albeit irregularly.
However, in the 1980s, when Nash was already in his fifties, his condition began to improve. As he later said: “In the end, I managed to get rid of irrational thinking, not thanks to drugs, but due to natural age-related hormonal changes.”
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Studies dating back to the 1930s, before the advent of antipsychotic drugs, showed that about 20% of patients recovered spontaneously. In more recent studies, up to 60% of patients achieve remission with modern treatment, which in this case is defined as the almost complete absence of symptoms for six months or more. It is not completely clear why the condition does not improve in all patients. However, certain factors are known to contribute to this.
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Those who become ill later in life have a better prognosis than those who become ill during adolescence. Nash was in his thirties when the first symptoms appeared. Social factors can also contribute to a favorable prognosis – the availability of work, the support of the environment and family members who help to cope with everyday difficulties. Nash was supported by colleagues who helped him find a job where he was well treated, he was also looked after by his wife, who, even after the divorce, took him to live with her so that he would not end up on the street.
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“We know that in many (though not all) patients, symptoms of schizophrenia, such as hallucinations and delusions, decrease with age,” says psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey. However, without access to medical care and without the support of the environment, their condition will only worsen over time. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that even in the most favorable circumstances, the manifestations of the disease will weaken by themselves. Most patients have to deal with them for the rest of their lives.