Summary Of William Lee's Junky

Junky is a novel about the author and his history of using drugs and the encounters he had with friends he made while scoring. William Lee also known as Bill, who was born in 1914 into a wealthy family in a Midwest city. The story starts out when Bill was a young child and he describes how he was constantly scared, he has had hallucinations. He says how they made him afraid to go to bed because of the horrid dreams he would have, he was constantly worried that when he woke up they would be reality. He even stated as a child that he would like to take opium because he over heard a maid talk about how opium gives you good dreams. Little did he know less than 20 years later he would have a real problem with addiction and opium would be one of

He paid $15 a week for a dirty apartment that was dark and never got any sunlight. When Bill started into the addiction of drugs it was almost easy. I say this because he had the money source to buy it. He claims that he never had the need for money, but after the addictions started that is when he found the need. Another way that I believe Bills life effected his mental status was the type of people he surrounded himself with. For instance, Bill had a friend named Norton. Norton was the type of guy who always found the need to steal no matter what it was. This is how Bill came into contact with his first drug, Morphine. Once Bill was hooked on drugs this did not help his mental status, a lot of the trips he would get from drugs would give him even more hallucinations. Where as others might have hallucinations that are happy, Bill had trips that were scary and very realistic to him.

Based on what we have gone over in class on schizophrenia paranoid type, I believe Bill fits right into this category. Although some of the classic traits of the diagnosis could also be categorized into you might what to call a “bad trip” because of the fact the he was a drug addict. Believe that he already that these symptoms and mixing them with drugs just made the symptoms shown just a lot worse for him. We know he has hallucination and delusions as a child even and is commonly shows paranoia from