Mental illness is apparent in Hamlet and One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest. Although the main characters from each book are prisoners to different disorders, it is very clear that they are not mentally stable.…
Mental Illness ‘Speak’ by Laurie Halse Anderson is an novel that explores a girl in high school who is raped at a party and she calls the cops and everyone hates her for it but she tells nobody about what happened which turns her to a very dark place and she ends up in a depressed state. Laurie Halse Anderson said herself "I've learned that Speak is not just a book about rape. Speak is a book about depression.…
Sylvia Plath’s, The Bell Jar takes readers deep into the chaotic minds of not only Esther Greenwood, but also Plath herself. Many people believe that The Bell Jar is intended to be an autobiography with Plath using Esther to portray some of the issues that happen in her life. In 1953, Plath gets invited to be a guest editor and during this time she endures a mental breakdown. This parallel reveals the sources of the madness for Plath, Esther and women all over. According to Esther, this madness comes from not wanting to succumb to the pressures of being the stereotypical housewife, not allowing herself to be dominated by men, and trying to prevent her personal relationships from impeding her progression toward her career goals.…
Thomas Szaz’s work, The Myth of Mental Illness, raises many questions as to what constitutes mental health and at what point do we label something as abnormal. As I read the article, the argument of homosexuality came to mind as it was once considered a mental illness prior to the 1970s. Szaz’s argument that mental illness may be a product of our environments and values also mirrors that of addiction: is addiction a disease, a choice, or a disease of choice? The ethical and social mores that individuals subscribe to may lead to varying views on the status of addiction and homosexuality as mental illnesses. Although Szaz’s argument is both plausible and strong, I do believe that mental illness exists and the denial of its existence could also be seen as the use of ethical norms to ignore what we find to be unpleasant or villainize those affected by mental health, rather than give them the validation and help that they need.…
The story of Chris McCandless shows a rebellious free spirit trying to live his life to the fullest. But is the story as black and white as it looks? “Into the Wild” by Jon Krakauer is a true story about the adventure of Chris McCandless. He travels around the country and mooches off people before he goes to Alaska and tragically dies. The early trauma to Chris caused him to be mentally unstable. Due to the similarities from Chris’ childhood and the authors I believe there has to be a romanticization of the story to better fit his ideal self. The author is manipulating the story to make the idea of living off the land and being a rebel better than it truly is. Chris could have had a possible mental illness as a result of early childhood…
Sylvia Plath’s semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, demonstrates the startling effects of an oppressive patriarchal society on a bright and accomplished woman. Esther’s descent into madness can be attributed towards 1950’s America’s absurd expectations of women, the pressure women place on each other and the patronising attitude of the medical world.…
When speaking about Sylvia Plath a word too often use is Tragedy, the tragedy that was her life and the pain that ended it. Plath is known for her cynical twisted writing, but never too far from the truthful pain no one dared to speak about. Plath was far more than just a sad woman who made it an art form. Plath was more than other women on the Ted Hughes list of accomplishments, she was a literary genius and was a face of a movement that 50 years later is still worthy of praise. Sylvia Plath should be known for not only her literary accomplishments but the voice she created for women too not only speak about the unspeakable but to be open about the serious nature of mental illness. Sylvia Plath’s suicide is said to have overshadowed…
Chapter two is especially powerful as Lucy, a person who suffers from multiple mental illnesses, begins by describing the mental health system as a resource that successfully improved her life. However, upon relapsing years later, the same system aided in the regression of Lucy’s mental health and limited her progress towards a healthier future. Through several mental health misdiagnoses and being forced to “self-admit” into a hospital, Lucy discusses the hardships of having a mental illness in a time where public budgets are being cut and priority is no longer given to treatments for individuals with mental…
Mental illnesses are some of the most difficult to diagnose, yet some of the most common illnesses in humans. JD Salinger, the author of Catcher in the Rye, once said that Holden Caulfield, the controversial and main character of the story, only needed a little attention and affection to help him find happiness. Despite these views, it is clear that Holden illnesses at such a young age with such a traumatic experience led him to have a different mindset than the rest of society. The Catcher in the Rye offers numerous examples of this kind of behavior that can only be explained by one thing. In JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Holden’s reaction to Allie’s death and resulting mental illness, skewed his understanding of the realities of adulthood and led him to his drastic view of society.…
There are a variety of reasons why a person might feel trapped and suffocated, and why they might be trying trying to change their lives by escaping an oppressive society. During one's everyday life it is not easy to understand what might be putting someone down, but when reading a story, an author can leave hints on why a character or characters might be feeling trapped and why they might be trying to escape from an oppressive society. In Charlotte Perkins Stetson’s short story The Yellow Wallpaper, the reader follows the narrator’s story through her diary, a woman wrongfully diagnosed and ordered to be locked inside a house by her husband, also being her doctor, and the events she goes through that reveal the narrator's descent into madness.…
The understanding of mental illness today since the early 1900s has changed significantly. In the 1900s, people still had no real understanding of what caused mental illnesses, let alone how to treat the disease. The disease was feared and was seen as incurable. Mentally ill patients would be sent to asylums, and as a form of treatment they were tortured. Until in the later 1900s, it was discovered that certain factors and drug therapy could be a treatment to cure the mentally ill. Today there are various forms of treatment and treatment settings for the different mental illnesses that help to benefit the patients’ condition.…
Mental health illness are more prevalent than people think, or want to believe. An estimate of 61.5 million Americans experience mental illnesses in a year. Contrary to popular belief, anyone can fall victim to a mental health illness. Approximately Four million adolescents suffer from mental illnesses, in the United States (www.nami.org). The growing rate of mental health issues has concluded in the improvement and expansion of mental health treatment, more research is being done on the different kinds of illnesses, and how to treat them, or cope with them.…
The notion of truth being a defined reasoning and represented as a one sided argument is unmistakably how most audiences visualize it. The concept cannot be interpreted in such close mindedness, as to tell the truth is to speak what appears “truthful” to “you”. Conflicting perspectives arise when the visualization of how feasible or veracious something is differs between individuals. The controversy surrounding Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, contentious poets of the twenty first century portray their own reality through their semi-confessional poetry. Sylvia Plath frequently extends her cereal obsession with her dead father as well as committing a certain bias declaration about past events to her poetry. If an audience were to read just Plath’s semi-autobiographical work the bell jar or even her late published work, Ariel they would quickly succumb to the confessional ‘finger pointing’ at Hughes and her father that she is notoriously regarded for. Hughes’ work, in contrast often speaks of the good times in their passionate relationship enticing less cynicism and promoting his protagonist-like character. Hughes’ “Fulbright Scholars”, for example has a much lighter tone with a series of guesses and faded recollection of enjoyable excitement confided in his first meeting with Plath. Condescending to Plath’s degenerative works like “the rabbit catcher” or “the jailer”, freckled with darkness and hatred. Without implication of Hughes’ goodness, he frequently took an objective stance in his work; “the minotaur” and “Sam” can both be interpreted as Hughes talking himself out of situation by exaggerating his veracity almost to a level of ‘whininess’. Reading about the two scholars, one would be lead to believe that they communicated to each other more through their poetry, expressing deeper emotions lyrically then they did conversely. The often strongly differing…
Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar contains a constant reference to a bell jar that acts as a controlling image. The bell jar in the novel controls the novel in three ways. It acts as a symbol for the depression that Esther Greenwood, the central character, experiences. It also serves as a metaphor for her. Finally, it is the very illusion that drives her into depression. Esther Greenwood works for a fashion magazine in New York and lives a "dream life" for many girls. She soon realizes that she lacks pleasant emotions and falls into despair. She constantly considers suicide and continually checks in and out of mental clinics. She often feels trapped, as if trapped in a glass jar, unable to escape. Also, she feels like an empty jar because she does not find happiness in life. Finally, she has recurrent thoughts of a "bell jar," which is an item that stands for all wrong in her life. The bell jar, a metaphorical illustration for many entities in the novel, controls the story and Esther's life.…
In the middle of the twentieth century, mental hospitals were seen as a waste of money, highly inhumane, and very ineffective. Around the 1960s, President Kennedy made it a priority to start reforming the nation’s mental health institutions, hoping to improve them. By the 1970s, a series of landmark court cases made it illegal for a hospital to retain or even possibly treat a patient against their will. In the year 1975, the drama film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest swept the Oscars, which offered the public a scathing denunciation towards mental hospitals. To illustrate, a person who suffers from schizophrenia cannot help but believe the voices they hear and the people they see. To them they are real and there is no cure for this cruel disease. Many families don't know how to cope with it because from everyone else’s eyes they see a person who is harming another person, but in that person’s eyes they see someone else forcing them to do so and telling them they have to do such a horrifying dead. Something as major as that can send that person straight to jail.…