Mental Illness In The Yellow Wallpaper

A mental illness is any kind of mental health condition or disorder. Mental illnesses affect mood, thinking, and behavior. A mental illness affects a character and the people close to them. It affects a character by causing sadness and disabling the things that the character is able to do. It affects the people close to them because others have to take care of them. A huge way that a mental illness affects a character is by causing sadness. Mental illnesses defiantly cause sadness to the character. For some mental illnesses like depression, sadness is what the mental illness is. Others also cause the character to be sad though. For example, a quote from the story is, "I cry at nothing, and cry most of the time"(Stetson 650). Crying most of the time implies that the character from "The Yellow Wall Paper" is sad most of the time. It seems like she's really lonely since she is by herself most of the time. Besides causing a character to constantly be sad, some mental illnesses disable what a character can do.
In "The Yellow Wallpaper" it seems like what the character can do is limited because all she does is lay around all day and look closely at the wall paper and all of the things in the room that she stays in. The text says, "lay there for hours trying to decide whether that front pattern and the back pattern really did go together or separately"(Stetson 653). It seems like all that it talks about her doing is laying around and paying close attention to the detail of something in her room. That is another example of how a mental illness can affect someone. But not only does a mental illness affect the character, it also affects the people close to