The woman who describes her life in the short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, appears to have schizophrenia. She exhibits several pronounced criteria for schizophrenia including disorganized thoughts, hallucinations, and aberrant thought. At the beginning of her writings the author appears to be in the prodromal phase as initially her symptoms are subtler and it even appears that the symptoms may be related to recovering from childbirth. She stays in her room and is not eating well or caring for herself. Her husband John urges her to take care of herself. He is concerned about her and has brought her to country house to recover. She appears depressed and exhausted. Her negative symptoms include her inability to function in any sort of normal …show more content…
She will write normally for a few sentences and then sip into aberrant content of thought. She becomes paranoid about the wallpaper and comes to believe that a woman is living in it and comes out of it. As a child she was very imaginative and spent hours personifying furniture. As she writes about her life and daily thoughts her writing voice is flat and unemotional. She is easily distracted and has attentional deficiencies. She is hypervigilant and experiences sensory overload while looking at the wallpaper. When she hallucinates she not only has visual hallucinations but olfactory hallucinations. At the end of the story she tears the wallpaper off the room and everything in the room is removed. She locks herself in and throws away the …show more content…
She was receiving treatment. Unfortunately, schizophrenia is not easily treated and there is not cure. Romechia may have stopped taking her medicine or altered her dosage and while this could have been what caused her break with reality, it seems cruel to punish her behavior. While she is responsible for her own self-care, one of the symptoms of schizophrenia is the lack of ability to do this. For me, the question revolves around the other adults who were involved in Romechia’s life: her therapist, her mother, the neighbors, and even those who were at the park. This happened in a public place, surely someone saw what was going on and chose not to act. We as a society, are not doing enough to help those suffering from mental illnesses. We are letting children like Ji’Aire fall through the cracks. Simms was unable to care for her son. There had to be indications of this long before his death. Her rehabilitation will now include not only her mental disorder but the death of her child. She needs grief counseling. She needs to be admitted to a mental health facility and that is a reasonable consequence for her inaction that caused the death of her child. If she chooses to have another child, it probably should be removed from her care. She has shown that she is incapable of caring for a
In Alan Brown’s article “The Yellow Wallpaper’: Another Diagnosis”; Brown discusses why Charolette Perkins Gilman published The Yellow Wallpaper as well as another diagnosis on the character in The Yellow Wallpaper. In the article it is explained that Gilman published this short story as a reflection of her own life. Gilman battled depression and sought out help from expert neurologist. The neurologist had suggested that she rest and be confined to her room. This experience lead to the creation of The Yellow Wallpaper. Being confined to a room like the character in The Yellow Wallpaper is enough to drive anyone to insanity. Brown had a different idea on why the character lost her mind and began to believe she was seeing figures in the wallpaper.
In the Lilies of the Field by William E. Barrett, Homer and Mother Maria both display straightforward, hardworking, and stubborn character traits. Firstly, Homer and Mother Maria both display a straightforward personality by being brutally honest about their opinions. For example, when Mother Maria asks Homer to build a chapel, Homer speaks his mind by telling her he does not want to build it. Mother Maria shows her straightforward behavior during Homer’s stay at the convent. One morning, when Homer sleeps in late, Mother to becomes extremely upset and is not afraid to show how she feels about him. Secondly, both Homer and Mother Maria display a hardworking spirit. Homer is a hardworking man because after finally agreeing to build the chapel,
Ashley’s death could have easily been prevented if she was given proper treatment and help both outside and inside the prison system. Ashley was part of a marginalized group of mentally ill individuals that are easy targets for criminalization in our society. Mental illness impacts all aspects of an individuals life, and instead of seeing it as an illness society sees it as a problem than needs to be dealt with so we don't have to see it. Once mentally ill people become marginalized members of society and once they make one “mistake” we feel the need to place them in the harshest institution so they can be fixed, which is the prison system. Criminalizing marginalized groups is so easy for members of our society, because we no longer see them as on of “us” we see them as people that need to be fixed. Furthermore, the prison system is extremely harmful to individuals with mental illness, the setup and setting of prisons can have detrimental affects to an individuals already ill mental state. This case showed how the criminalization of a mentally ill individual and the lack of treatment within the prison system lead to horrible outcomes, as a society we should stop criminalizing marginalized groups as an easy fix to societal problems and instead we should actively help solve the
In the short story, The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the narrator of the story is a woman who is struggling with her mental health. Throughout the story, she progressively gets worse in her condition, due to the lack of mental health awareness, and her treatment plan. To start off, she is given the “rest” method of treatment.This is a treatment that focuses on letting the brain rest due to the thought that mental health issues were just a matter of an overactive or overstimulated mind. The narrator’s husband is the reason why her condition continued to get slowly worse, his main concerns were making her normal again, even if he hurt her in the process. Although this story can be interpreted many ways, through symbolism and
She was placed in this treatment called the “rest cure” that made her somewhat like a prisoner. She started to slowly decrease into psychosis due to her husband’s treatment, the environment, and the way society has treated her illness. The love the husband felt for his wife and the fear he had of losing her lead him to treat her in questionable ways. He placed her in environment that made her feel trapped and aided to her reduction in sanity. Ann Oakley in her article, “Beyond the Yellow Wallpaper” discusses how important this story truly is. Oakley talks about the gender differences and the harm that it can bring to a society. This treatment was acceptable and normal for the situation because society has taught him and her that it was normal. Even if the protagonist’s husband meant well the treatment she was placed in for depression lead her to have more psychological damage, increasing her insanity more each
“The Yellow Wallpaper” is a story about an anonymous female narrator and her husband John who is a physician who has rented a colonial manner in the summer. Living in that house, the narrator felt odd living there. Her husband, john who is a physician and also a doctor to his wife felt that the narrator is under nervous depression. He further mentions that when a person is under depression, every feeling is an odd feeling. Therefore, the narrator was not given permission by John to work but just to take medication and get well fast. This made the narrator to become so fixated with the yellow wallpaper in the former nursery in which she located. She was depressed for a long time and became even more depressed. This ha...
Thank you for your email regarding Miss Eve Edmunds, where you asked for my assistance in establishing whether Miss Edmunds was owed a duty of care by Mr Alistair Agard. From my understanding of the tort of negligence, Miss Edmunds would be classed as a secondary victim of psychiatric harm, and it is my belief that she was indeed owed a duty of care by Mr Agard. Below I will assess whether Miss Edmunds was suffering from a recognised psychiatric injury (RPI), explain the distinguishing features between primary victims (PV) and secondary victims (SV) of psychiatric harm, consider the Alcock quadripartite test, examine the difficulties that may be faced should Miss Edmunds be considered a ‘rescuer’, and then culminate by bringing all
"The Yellow Wallpaper" was written in the late nineteenth century. In that period of time hysteria was thought to occur through irregular blood flow from the uterus to the brain. Over the years the definition of hysteria has changed. Today hysteria can be defined as, "a state of mind, one of unmanageable fear or emotional excesses"("Hysteria biography"). From the research I have done it seems that the fear the person has is usually centered on a certain body part even though there is nothing wrong with it, "a patient experiences physical symptoms that have a psychological, rather than an organic, cause"("Hysteria"). The story does give some evidence of her showing hysterical behavior. For example, in the beginning of the story she tells us she is sick but her husband, John, who is a physician, does not believe there is anything wrong with her, "You see he does not believe I am sick!"(Gilman 103). Although the narrator does show these symptoms of hysteria her overall symptoms lead me to think that she may have postpartum depression.
The husband and brother of the narrator are physicians, and neither believe that she is sick, they say “there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency.” (The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman) and so she is confined mentally, with what they tell her to do, although she thinks there are other things that would fare her better. As the story continues she begins to have more delusions and the wallpaper in her room begins to come alive. But the most alarming effects were the hallucinations.”
Andrea Yates, a nurse and mother, drowned her five children--Noah, 7; John, 5; Paul, 3; Luke, 2; and Mary, 6 months--one at a time in their family bathtub on June 20, 2001. In 2002, she was sentenced to life in prison, but due to testimony from a prosecution medical expert, she was granted a new trial by a court of appeals. After twelve men and women debated the case for 13 hours over three days, they said Yates did not know her actions were wrong when she drowned her children ("Andrea Yates Case”). In order to prove to the jurors that Yates was mentally ill, testimonies that demonstrated her illness, depression, hospitalization records, and suicide attempts were documented. They also had evidence that she had been given drugs that were not appropriate, was released from the hospital early, was overmedicated, and had discontinued taking her medicine two days before the kills transpired (Paquette).
In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, through expressive word choice and descriptions, allows the reader to grasp the concepts she portrays and understand the way her unnamed narrator feels as the character draws herself nearer and nearer to insanity. “The Yellow Wallpaper” begins with the narrator writing in a journal about the summer home she and her husband have rented while their home is being remodeled. In the second entry, she mentions their bedroom which contains the horrendous yellow wallpaper. After this, not one day goes by when she doesn’t write about the wallpaper. She talks about the twisting, never-ending pattern; the heads she can see hanging upside-down as if strangled by it; and most importantly the
"The Yellow Wallpaper," by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, depicts a woman in isolation, struggling to cope with mental illness, which has been diagnosed by her husband, a physician. Going beyond this surface level, the reader sees the narrator as a developing feminist, struggling with the societal values of the time. As a woman writer in the late nineteenth century, Gilman herself felt the adverse effects of the male-centric society, and consequently, placed many allusions to her own personal struggles as a feminist in her writing. Throughout the story, the narrator undergoes a psychological journey that correlates with the advancement of her mental condition. The restrictions society places on her as a woman have a worsening effect on her until illness progresses into hysteria.
When viewed from a strictly medical, psychological aspect, Andrea Yates medical history indicates that after the birth of her first child, she began to suffer from various forms of depression and suicide attempts. If one only examines the paper trail and doesn’t think beyond what the medical history does or does not indicate, then perhaps, Andrea would be innocent by reason of mental insanity as the 2006 acquittal suggest. However, when viewed form a legal aspect there are several inconstancies that challenge if this former nurse was insane or if she in fact premeditated the murder of her children as well as her acquittal.
Tracy’s father was faced with an unfortunate decision, and in his decision, I cannot condemn him for his actions. Now saying this I don’t believe what he did was particularly the right decision or particularly the wrong decision. As for his life sentence, it’s quite outrageous. My reasoning for this is because of his actual intentions and his mental rationale in doing so. He claims that he did it out of love and mercy, which I whole-heartedly agree with. With Tracy’s condition already being a significant trouble to live with and the fact that her surgeries brought her much pain and suffering is something that would be hard to bear. They claimed that she had the mental capacity of a four month old baby, so in that sense, it’s almost like watching an innocent baby constantly in pain. One part of the case says that Tracy’s mother believed that the many surgeries especially the one that removed her upper thigh bone were not surgeries but mutilations. I can see why her mother would think this. I can only imagine what it would be like to watch your loved one constantly be mutilated and going under the knife. Surgery and visits to the doctor alone can be stressful enough in itself, let alone ones that can be perceived as mutilations. Additionally the case states that Tracy had 5-6 seizures a day, which would imaginably be hard to watch and care for. Ultimately, I cannot in any way condemn Tracy’s
The Yellow Wallpaper is narrated by the main character in the story. From the way the story is told and written, we all know that the narrator is a female. She also states that her husband is named John. The jist of the story is that John and her brother are physicians who diagnosed her with temporary nervous depression. Of course she disagrees and thinks she is just sick. They thought it was in her best interest to rest and do no work what so ever. During this time they stayed in an old inherited home that was off by itself. This was a place where she could get plenty of rest, exercise, and air. While staying at this place, John was always gone for work but did not allow her to write about herself or situation. They felt it would make her