MovieChat Forums > Pawn Sacrifice (2015) Discussion > What was Bobby's Mental Condition?

What was Bobby's Mental Condition?


Was he ever diagnosed?

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Not sure, but his severe sensitivity to sounds and social awkwardness leads me to believe it was Aspergers.




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Aspergers is too mild for Bobby. I think it was something much more severe like schizophrenia or some sort of psychosis.

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I'd guess schizophrenia with some associative disorders thrown in. An especially severe case of Aspergers could be another possibility.

It's not exactly a stretch to guess he had several conditions in effect at the same time.

The fact he achieved worldwide fame and at least for a while great riches probably contributed to his conditions going untreated and getting worse.

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In the movie, Fischer's symptoms are textbook paranoid schizophrenia. I can see the idea of Asberger's, too, but, at least as portrayed here, his mental condition was clearly abnormal to the point of psychosis.

I wonder if he was ever treated. I suspect anti-psychotic drugs - especially the drugs available back in those days - would have destroyed his game. Perhaps that's what his muse, Fr. Peter Sarsgaard, meant when he said that medicating Bobby would be like "pouring cement down a holy well," or something like that.

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Maybe he was a brilliant chess player and some adjective by anyone in the psychiatric field is not wanted because they should respect his right to privacy and keep their pseudoscience to themselves.





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[deleted]

Maybe he was a brilliant chess player and some adjective by anyone in the psychiatric field is not wanted because they should respect his right to privacy and keep their pseudoscience to themselves.


If Fischer had had a physical illness would you be be bothered by people speculating about what it was?

They made a biopic about him in which he was portrayed as mentally ill. It's natural for people to speculate about the nature of that illness. Furthermore, he's dead and was a celebrity (at the time the film takes place), which puts "right to privacy" in a different light. Finally, people can speculate about any ***ing thing they want. If this is the most bothersome imdb thread to you, then you must not spend much time here.

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On this board people gave three different diagnosis when legitimate psychiatrist or counselors should NEVER divulge any information about any patient. They should know better and keep their arm chair conclusions to themselves.

It's a pseudo science. There are no diffinitive tests.

I'm sure Bobby liked the adjectives brilliant chess player.

Why don't we all view it as God created Bobby for a specific purpose in mind and whatever traits you all see as defects helped guide him in the direction he needed to go.



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Why don't we all view it as God created Bobby for a specific purpose in mind
Because we all don't live in la-la fantasy land. And there is nothing wrong with someone speculating on the conditions of the character as portrayed in the film. And schizophrenia and the like are real syndromes. Dismissing them as "pseudo science" doesn't make that not so. DUH.

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Because we all don't live in la-la fantasy land. And there is nothing wrong with someone speculating on the conditions of the character as portrayed in the film. And schizophrenia and the like are real syndromes. Dismissing them as "pseudo science" doesn't make that not so. DUH.

 I know, right? Why not believe some imaginary bearded father figure in the sky created him that way to beat commies instead of just trying to learn lessons from his mental illness to help people with the same condition? 
It's the voodoo mentality that had bipolar people "exorcized" instead of helped.

Some people are just hilarious. Does Fischer look like a happy guy at any point in his life? Isn't it more important than beating people at something so that other people who were born in the same country can feel better about themselves?

For every lie I unlearn I learn something new - Ani Difranco

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I agree with this, except that the religious like authority of the medical diagnosis especially when it comes to the psychological field and even more the medication used to treat illnesses isn't necessarily good. The fear of people going crazy has science caging them with drugs that don't really fix anything but sedates them and keeps them docile.

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The movie is not an accurate depiction of his actual mental state or personality.

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Indeed, in the 70s there were no atypical anti-psychotics; to my knowledge only Thorazine existed at that time and this drug is a potent dopamine antagonist, aka has a strong mind numbing effect. It effectively lowers the IQ.

Fanboy : a person who does not think while watching.

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They said in the movie that he was displaying symptoms of paranoia and delusional psychosis, but later in life he may have suffered from more or other mental conditions as well.

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Yes, Fisher was mentally impaired...

Fisher knew about the Filipino-led and funded Bolshevik revolution, he knew about the control of US foreign policy by the State of Iceland, and he knew about Eskimo control of the banking cartel in the "Free World".

Clearly he was displaying symptoms of paranoia and delusional psychosis. I mean what other possible explanation could there be? Surely you cannot be suggesting that the Amish-dominated psychiatric profession would defame a man just to protect Amish hegemony over post-american america? If that's what you're saying, you many require the assistance of caring professionals yourself, Shirley. Lucky for you God's Frozen People have positioned Eskimo psychiatrists all over this great land to help those who have become confused by putting on the glasses that enable them to see things our little gentile minds are not meant to know.

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United States Chess Federation Life Master, Chris Chase commented, "The film portrays Fischer as a wide-eyed crazy person even from day one, and he wasn’t like that at all."

http://artery.wbur.org/2015/09/29/pawn-sacrifice

He likely had aspergers but was not crazy.

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At the time of the 1972 Match, no one had ever suggested that Fischer had mental problems. That came much, much later - in the 1980s with stories about his anti-Semitic remarks and distribution of pamphlets, etc., which quite naturally coincided with a huge drop in his popularity. His behavior in Reykjavik in 1972 with his numerous demands and protests (including the air-conditioning was too noisy, orange juice was not cold enough, etc.) were criticized by the Soviets as deliberate attempts to disturb and unsettle his opponent - and not seen as signs of his own mental problems. There was indeed evidence that Spassky was rattled by all these disturbances and disputes. In order to get Fischer resume the match, Spassky - against the advice of the Soviet authorities - agreed to Fischer's condition to play the third game in a closed room without spectators. Spassky lost that game and in fact managed to win only one more game for the remaining part of the match.

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I had an Abnormal Psychology class in college about 10 years ago and the teacher talked about somebody who became the US Chess Champion at age 15 and he was schizophrenic. She couldn't say his name but it must have been Fischer.

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She couldn't say his name because she preferred not to say it, or because she in fact did not know anything and what she said was purely on hearsay?

Fischer became US Chess Champion at age 14 and became the youngest grandmaster at that time in the following year.

You can't say a person is schizophrenic just by casual observation or because you "think" he must be so. As far as I know one could determine a person to be schizophrenic only after long or detailed observation and analysis (and even then it is not infallible), and obviously Fischer had not gone for any such psychiatric treatment.

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n his case, you have a guy who learned chess and had to have practiced it over and over and over before anyone every saw him publicly. No one likes or cares about chess, and I mean the general public, and he had school and other things to study, and so that amounts to a lot of social isolation.


You are looking at things from a contemporary perspective. At the time chess was becoming a popular spectator sport. People around the world actually followed the Fischer-Spassky matches and were familiar the great grandmasters of the day (granted, helped along by the Cold War and chess's considerable longstanding popularity in Russia, and the success of Fischer himself). Since Kasparov played Deep Blue chess has never again had that level of attention, except in certain countries (India, maybe Russia still) where pockets of popularity persist.

You are right about social isolation, but for the wrong reasons. To become a top chess player you have to be obsessed. It's the same with any sport or competitive activity really, to be the best you have to put in insane amounts of work. But with chess the level of mental abstraction required to be good, to think so many moves ahead, is better suited to certain minds. You have to think differently to be really well suited to playing chess, so it makes sense that great chess players would be more likely to have atypical minds. (This is seen in cultural representations of the sport; see e.g. Nabokov's The Defense, or even some of Fischer's contemporaries)


Regarding "jews" there's no such thing as jews, it's a cult of people who say they're holy, have an economic clique, and are in charge of most media and many financial institutions. If you aren't jewish and you suddenly find yourself surrounded by them and they're calling all the shots, it could make you paranoid. In that case, it's rational paranoia. It would seem that the rest of the people around you are just ignorant.


"Jews" can refer to practitioners of the Judaic religion, or members of the Jewish ethnicity regardless of religious practice (note I said ethnicity not race). Much maligned and persecuted throughout history the Jewish diaspora persisted by specializing in valued professions and maintaining tight knit communities. These behaviors invited more paranoia and suspicion, and a body of prejudicial rhetoric that appeals to all sorts of paranoids looking for conspiracy theories or political conmen looking for sacrificial scapegoats.

Paranoia isn't a rational behaviour. Relying on prejudicial stereotypes to try and justify it speaks to ones own irrational beliefs.

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I'm old enough to remember when he was playing.

No one is interested in chess or every has been compared to the world population or even the west. It's like flute playing or something, no one is interested. It's nice to have a flute being played, but it's not an electric guitar.

Jews are a cult, and not even an ethnicity, that's just hype. They're no more an ethnicity than say Baptists are. Their entire history is legend made up by them and they aren't even from the same part of the world. There's no record of them existing in ancient history and so on. They exist as an economic and mating cult, but mostly an economic one.

An economic cult is going to have REAL conspiracies going on. Minor ones are going to be about nepotism. That's why once jews get into an industry they take it over. They hire all of their cult members and then unfairly block talented people from entering. That was a major reason the Nazis hated them, for instance.

If you think about it, any cult, not just jews, are all about conspiracies. The lore is a lie, most know that a supernatural being didn't give them orders, they tell this to kids, simpletons, etc. With jews, if you dare to contradict them, call them out in public, etc they will attempt to destroy you. You will be called a bigot, etc when in fact it's them who are the liars and bigots.

A smart person will see this clearly because it's the truth.

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I'm pretty sure that some people make the most aberrant posts just to check and see if anyone's paying attention.
A smart person can clearly see that.

Or for your sake I hope so.

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I read a couple of his posts in other movie threads. He is anti-semitic to the core.

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[deleted]

My guess was obsessive compulsive.(Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder) He might have been borderline schizophrenic but at the time he wasn't completely wrong about the Russians. Isolation could've played a factor. He played and thought about chess since he was a child. He even talks about it while having sex so yeah autism could also be it.

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paranoid schizophrenia. No doubt.

ok, im ready now!

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