I remember watching A Beautiful Mind for about half an hour when it first came out on DVD with my parents, but if memory serves me correctly, Becca came over, and we proceeded to head out to Oak Lake for some good times with the intial members of what would soon be O.L.B.A.D. I had also tried to watch it last Saturday after i watched The Italian Job and after I saw a Blades game with Nicole and Jordan. So yeah. A two and a half hour movie usually doesn't get finished if you start watching it at like one in the morning.
So yeah, assuming this is one of those 'everyone but you has seen this, you fool!' movies I'm going to blab on about it without reservation, assuming that I won't be hurting too many people's feelings by ruining the movie for them. I thought it was pretty amazing, and as much as I don't like Russel Crowe, he is a brilliantly talented actor. He really played his part so well that I would venture to say that this is a preemptive makeup for Master and Commander. Oh, that movie was awful. But back to the good movie.
It's about this math genius guy who has schizophrenia, and is convinced that the CIA or DOD or some acronymic entity has hired him in the states to figure out codes in American periodicals from the Russians who are plotting to plant a bomb or something. That part's not really important. You just have to know that he's crazy. So anyway, he ends up in a mental institution and discovers that moments in his life had never really happened-- he was imagining them! How horrible. So his world gets turned upsidedown, and his wife stays by him for years and years until he finally figures out how to ignore all these delusions he's seeing, and he can go back to teaching math or figuring out some equation that only Brett would understand. He almost drowns his infant son in there somewhere as well. I'd probably be able to tell it better if I had seen it twice. But I'm not going to sit through it again just to appease the viewing audience of my blog.
So, like most things, this movie got me thinking... Brett likes math... he talks about people I've never met... just kidding. That's not what I was really thinking, but I suspect I had you going there for a while.
It actually got me thinking about how horrible it would be to experience something like that. Mental illnesses have been given such a bad rep. It's like you're no longer socially normal anymore if you have a chemical imbalance in your brain. Does that make sense? Not to me. Last October or November, this guy came and spoke in chapel about mental illness in the church. He was amazing. He suffered from bi-polar disorder (maybe it's a disease, I'm not too sure) and had been discriminated against because of it. Listen up! Especially Christians reading this. Mental illnesses are not demon provoked, and people don't get them because they don't have enough faith. They shouldn't be treated like lepers, and they are definitely capable of functioning in the church when they are given a chance. In the movie, Russel Crowe's character (John Nash)'s colleague decided to pay him a visit while he was recovering. Nash was cracking jokes at his friend's expense, and had actually normalized that he was crazy. The saddest part of that scene is that his colleague's 'partner in crime' refused to visit John because he was afraid he'd put on some public display and strip naked or do a voodoo dance at him or something. I don't think that would have been the case here.
I was in my Intro to Counselling class on Wednesday, and I learned that statistically, 25% of the population (i.e. 25/100 people) will carry 75% of all mental illnesses. That's insane. Who is reaching out to these people to offer the only hope that Jesus can offer? I know that aversion therapy is fun to talk and fantasize about, but really, when a person suffers from depression, they don't want to take medication that forces them to feel happy, do they? The general consensus of people that have taken antidepressants is a resounding 'hell no!' These people may not realize it, but Christ is knock-knock-knockin' on their door. Who knows, maybe Jesus could supernaturally heal them, and they would no longer suffer the prison that is mental illness!
Mental illness sucks because it is all up there, upstairs in your brain, and no one can see it. For all they know, you could be faking it to get some attention. But you could outright lie and tell someone that you have cancer, skip work to go to the bar, and then simply tell people you went to chemotherapy, and you'd get all the sympathy cards and fruit trays you could imagine. I for one have decided to have more compassion for the mentally ill. Please educate yourself about these diseases and disorders. These people need Jesus too!
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