Mental Disorders In Edgar Allan Poe's Short Stories

In his short stories, Edgar Allan Poe creates characters with deep problems, including mental illness and alcoholism. They frequently blame external forces for the problems that ensue and are never honest with themselves as to the root of their issues. Once they think that they have found the source of their problems, they try as hard as they can to ameliorate these problems. Despite their efforts, they succeed only in unweaving their own connection to physical reality. These characters are unable to outrun their demons and are ultimately destroyed by their own arrogance and self-deceit. Poe’s writing draws significantly from personal experience; in particular his writing about mental illness draws significantly from his own experience with bipolar disorder. Interestingly enough, many creative innovators like Poe also suffered from bipolar, including other writers such as Ernest Hemingway, musicians such as Chris Brown and Kurt Cobain, and mathematicians such as Ada Lovelace and Georg Cantor, who created the beauty that is modern set theory.
Cantor is perhaps the most interesting person to compare Poe with. Beside having Bipolar, both produced brilliant work that went underappreciated during their lifetime. In fact, Cantor’s work (in pure math!) was so controversial that Leopold Kronecker, a mathematical great in
These characters are destroyed not only by these issues, but also by their unwillingness to confront their problems. The mental health and substance abuse issues of these characters would have done significant damage on their own, but this damage is elevated to total obliteration only after being amplified by the character’s arrogance. It is Poe’s insight that bottled up issues seem to grow until they destroy us. If we follow this dangerous path of burying our emotions our own life clocks may be but minutes to