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Nash was treated for his dissociated states into paranoid schizophrenia with insulin therapy, drugs, shock therapy, and talk therapy, none of which seemed to help his condition. His wife at first stood by him, and then divorced him. The great mathematical genius that enabled Nash to see patterns in behavior and numbers, and to construct predictable equations about human decision-making had dissolved into ravings about government agents, and nonsensical theorems.

After the failure of modern psychiatry and medicine to treat the mathematician, Nash became "a phantom who haunted Princeton in the 1970s and 80s, scribbling on the blackboards and studying religious texts." (Nassar, p.19) Yet, while Nash wandered aimlessly on the campus, this mathematician's former name, always great, suddenly "began to surface everywhere -- In economics textbooks, articles on evolutionary biology, political science treatises, mathematics journals," as his works, like that of all geniuses, became more rather than less relevant to modern life and modern thought. (Nassar, pp. 19-20).

Miraculously, by the time Nash was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1994, he had manifested a spontaneous recovery from his mental illness. Sometimes this happens with paranoid schizophrenics, although it is rare. His remission occurred without the aid of therapy or drugs, although his wife, whom he later remarried and lives with to this day, attributes his newfound enthusiasm to being in the atmosphere of campus life. Now, "at seventy-three John looks and sounds wonderfully well." Nash states that he is certain he will not suffer a relapse. "It is like a continuous process rather than just waking up from a dream." And understanding processes of the human mind in a rational and mathematical way were and are Nash's specialty. (Nassar, p. 389)