How John`s attitude toward the narrator in ‘’The Yellow Wallpaper’’ mirrors social attitudes regarding mental illnesses

How John`s attitude toward the narrator in ‘’The Yellow Wallpaper’’ mirrors social attitudes regarding mental illnesses The diagnoses, treatment, and overall understanding of mental illnesses have progressed greatly from when “The Yellow Wallpaper” was written. In those times the classification of a mental illness for a woman was madness. Women were treated accordingly, and not just by their doctors, but by their families and communities. Today, many facilities and medications exist to help individuals recover from a mental illness as best they can, and there are trained physicians and psychologists who can properly identify their illnesses. The only aspect that has not been completely altered since then is the way someone often reacts to another person’s mental illnesses. There are many people today who would treat someone with depression, nearly the same way John, in “The Yellow Wallpaper”, treated his wife, who had postpartum depression. That would be to firstly deny there is even a problem, and then try and conceal it out of embarrassment from family and friends. In the nineteenth century, women had no rights and could therefore make few decisions for themselves. In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, John decides there is nothing wrong with his wife, despite her complaints. When she stops performing her duties as a wife and mother, he can ignore it no more. So he then simply refers to it as a “temporary nervous depression” (page 1). John is belittling the narrator’s illness, and we can tell she is upset by this when she says: “If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but […] a slight hysterical tendency – what is one to do?``. He is not only convincing her that there is no serious problem with her, but he also tells their family and friends that it is just “a slight hysterical tendency”; downgrading it so it does not sound as bad as it is.
In the article “A

Cited: Perkins Gilman, Charlotte. "The Yellow Wallpaper" Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg, 01 Nov. 1999. Web. 31 Oct. 2013. Quawas, Rula. "A NEW WOMAN 'S JOURNEY INTO INSANITY: DESCENT AND RETURN IN THE YELLOW WALLPAPER." AUMLA : Journal of the Australasian Universities Modern Language Association.105 (2006): 35,53,147-148. ProQuest. Web. 28 Oct. 2013. “The Yellow Wallpaper”. Dir. John Clive. Perf. Stephen Dillane, Julia Watson, Carolyn Pickles. BBC, 1989. Film.