Tonight, I watched "A Beautiful Mind" for the first time.

I struggle with understanding mental illness, a collection of debilitating diseases that I feel falls to the wayside of the mainstream media radar that prefers to focus on diseases that are more "mediable" - with pink and red ribbons and celebrity spokespeople.

There is mental illness in my family. I've grown up as a third party to it, observing its degeneration of a seemingly healthy person and perhaps worse, observing its debilitation of those left to pick the pieces when it strikes.

It's unlike cancer, which can quickly or not so quickly, take a life. Sometimes, like tonight, when I think for a long time about mental illness, I think cancer or AIDS is the more "kind" of diseases, only in that the victim can finally find peace in death at the end of its road. People with mental illness can struggle from their teens over a long life span, working tiring days just to manage the disease. Often, they are incapable of working at anything but balancing these demons.

Mental illness offers no peace at the end of its fight. Like cancer, which kills or hides in remission, mental illness always lurks and tortures not only the victim, but everyone in the victim's life.

Mental illness is contagious, not in the literal term, but in the figurative way that it creates an aura of insanity among all of those involved. It rips apart families, sometimes in an act of violence, during which the victim is delusional and has no idea for instance, that he is standing over his wife, whom he has savagely beaten, as his children, ages 3, 6 and 8 cower in the corner and are forced to watch as he cocks and discharges a rifle's bullet into their mother and then into himself.

And so it spreads. Those children, already genetically prone to illness, grow with this sick seed inside of them and more violence is triggered from past incidents of stress created by those sick before them. And they have children, who are scarred by similarly violent outbursts and like cancer, it grows and grows in each generation.

People do not frequently get screened or tested for mental illness, as they would for another disease, perhaps because progess in this area has been so slow in comparision to diseases like luekemia. Treatment is equally unadvanced, and inevitably the afflicted spend lifetimes trying a varying cocktail of medications that offer short term relief. In essence, the victim, or more appropriately, the victim's family, sit and watch for the bomb to resurface.

Families almost hold their breath with each milestone, a marriage or a birth, things that should be happy times in people's lives, beause they know that the individual is never free of the illness. They know that even the simplest of tasks, like teaching a child the alphabet, can trigger enough stress to send that person into a straight jacket for two months.

I have loved people who have suffered from many diseases. One of the worst I have seen is luekemia, a purely torturous way to die. I have often thought that that death by luekemia is the most cruel death of all. To see it, and to know how it kills the victim, is to truly understand its vulgarity.

In my mind, though, that of severe mental illness, is the worst. It is almost unimaginable in my opinion, for the most sane of children to recover from growing up with a skitzophrenic.

The best you can do, is to make jokes, weak jokes, at the episodes as they occur. The conspiracy theories and the phone calls late at night, from that person who has absolutely no idea, where she is or how she got there, but has the fear of God in her voice.

You don't know the fear of God, by the way, until you hear it in the voice of skitzophrenic. You truly don't know, until you hear it. But when you hear it, and it doesn't matter how old you are, you recognize it.

More frightening though is diagnosis and treatment. There really aren't X-rays where you can point and say, "Ahhh, yes, here is the problem. This is what we will use to reduce it" or "we will remove it."

All treatments in this area are educated guesses. Doctors in this field are somewhat of a legion of mad scientists, diffusing and increasing millograms and chemical compounds to produce a temporarily level playing field. They don't even bother to present the options of healing. That is not an option.

Being with a mentally ill person is one of the most draining experiences known to me. It can be as if the hour spent with them is a practice of transference and when you leave, you begin to question what you see and hear. You question that voice of conscience in your head, and for quick seconds, panic that you too may now be hearing voices. You wonder if your close friends are reality, or people you've made up.

Occasionally, you will overanalyze forgetfulness or the tricks tired eyes can play on the mind, and wonder if mental illness is starting to surface within you.

Jumping at a shadow out of the corner of your eye can create paranoia and extreme anxiety. A sense of being overwhelmed in a crowded store or social situation will raise questions in your mind, asking if it is now your turn to be making confused calls to those in your life.

Tonight, I saw very little beauty in John Nash's mind. I saw extraordinary strength on the part of his wife and son, and those around him who put aside their fears of the dumbfounding disease that beheld him and the tragedy he was capable of causing while nurturing him anyway.

The beauty in that story was less in his genius and more in the example of a community of people able to interface with him at a paranormally human level.

That wasn't a film, it's reality for many people. It's a life where you struggle to understand how normal people do simple things like get their hair cut and clean laundry or collect leaves for pleasure.

The greatest achievement that I can imagine in my lifetime, is that of a drug is created to truly balance degenerative skitzophrenia. Let's see Stephen Hawkings take a stab at that.

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