When I rented “A Beautiful Mind” in August I was house-sitting over the weekend for my mother. On Sundays my brother 3 of 12 usually comes over for dinner. He showed up a short time after I started watching the videotape. He watched it for a bit but then he got up and left. He said that although he sort of wanted to watch it, it just reminded him too much of how difficult it had been when he first got ill.

3 of 12 is 2 and 1/2 years older than I am (I'm 5 of 12). When we were very young he was the big brother who I admired. He made up weird TV shows that were fun to play in, and he could run faster than anyone else in the family. With his light hair, blue eyes, and fine features he was and still is the best looking of the seven boys in my family. In high school he was an average but not stellar student and although he was shy with the girls, he always had a fair number of friends.

I was just starting college the first time he got ill, so I don't know a lot of the details. He had tried college but had dropped out after a semester. He was still living at home and working at a local grocery store. I can remember that my father had been really hounding him to move out. Anyway, sometime around his 21st birthday, things went bad for him. He started acting strangely and eventually had to be hospitalized. I can’t recall much of what he was doing, but I think a lot of it was religiously based. Years later he told me that he can remember being in the hospital and thinking he was in purgatory because he had become invisible. To test his hypothesis he took off all his clothing and started running around. He also thought that inanimate objects were thinking bad thoughts about him.

In order to keep him sane they have him on a lot of medication. There are a fair number unpleasant side effects like sluggishness and tardive kinesisia, which makes his arm twitch. The first few years after he became ill he would occasionally try to go off the medication. Since he was thinking normally he figured he was cured, so why have to deal with the unpleasant side effects. Every time he did though he would end up back in the hospital, and after a while he came to accept that he was permanently disabled.

Sometime when 3 of 12 was in his teens he and I stopped getting along. I ended up quite a bit bigger than him, and I remember that when I was twelve or thirteen I punched him in the face during an argument we had over a piece of toast. Although I was somewhat disturbed when he got ill, because we had already become so distant it didn’t have a huge impact on me. My younger brother 6 of 12 was really bothered by it though. 3 of 12 had been his best friend and now there is an awkward silence between them.

3 of 12 doesn’t live a horrible life. He has a number of disabled friends, he collects music, works part time, and plays a lot of sports. The medication he is on makes it impossible to drive, so I play chauffer for him occasionally. It is a very difficult burden to live with and I respect him for the grace with which he has adjusted to his situation. It is difficult not to be able to trust your own thoughts and to consign yourself to a rather limited future.

One night we were both staying at my mothers and I woke up to find him standing over me in his underwear. He said in a very flat, unemotional voice, “Remember that time you punched me in the face?” I said “Yes” and he hit me really hard in the face (I think I had a black and blue mark on my cheek). I was so startled I didn’t do anything, and he got up and left the room.

I can see similarities between John Nash’s illness and my brother's. They both have this detached, emotionless air about them. Nash’s grand illusions about himself were related to world politics and my brother’s were religious but both were equally illogical. My brother still gets strange thoughts in his head and he can never be certain about the rationality of anything he is thinking. On the other hand they were very different people before they became ill and they remain very different. While Nash was and is very arrogant and rude, my brother is and always has been quiet and reserved. The book ‘A Beautiful Mind’ was a very good read, and it was interesting to see into the mind of someone else who suffered the same illness as my brother.