Schizophrenia in The Yellow Wallpaper
Throughout history people have always seemed to follow what notions that were considered "cool". Though I doubt that "cool" was the word used to describe these notions they were still there in some form or another. One of the greatest farces ever committed in the name of these popular perceptions was medicine. At that time, medicine that was on the cutting edge seem to have always involved some sort of noxious chemical or a typically atrocious diet. Not to mention the fact that ninety-nine percent of the doctors were men. Women's notions were immediately discounted on the bases of the preconception that women were not meant for such enlightened thoughts. No, men really knew what was best and women were meant to stand by what their husbands' said. This brings one particular husband to mind and how he was responsible for his wife going completely and utterly insane. His name is John and he is the husband to a woman who was diagnosed with a temporary nervous depression, meaning a slight hysterical tendency.
Through John's interference he turned what was considered a minor case of a chemical imbalance into to full blown schizophrenia. During the turn of the century, which is when this story took place, what scientists knew of the human mind wouldn't fill the inside of a matchbook. This was for certain the case when it was a woman who was the patient. If there was any deviation in the accepted behavior of a woman as deemed by society, the woman was considered hysterical. When dealing with these patients, instead of seriously considering the consequences of their actions, they went along with obscenely stupid notions on how to deal with problems of the mind.
The conventional course of action to take in the narrator's case was the one of nothing. I mean literally, nothing. For the narrator was considered hysterical and slightly depressed and there was only one course of action for such symptoms. That was one of complete rest. In those days the rest cure was very popular. It involved being set apart from anything that might have even the remotest possibility of stress in it. The main character of The Yellow Wallpaper was indeed set apart from all activity as directed by her husband. John dutifully followed the set path, not questioning any of the accepted methods.
While on vacation for the summer, the narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" is, at the most, depressed at the beginning of their visit to a colonial mansion. Her husband John, however, thinks there is nothing wrong with her except temporary nervous depression (pg 391) and has her confined to a bedroom upstairs. I believe John loves her very much and is trying to help her get well, but he won’t believe there is an illness unless he can read about it or see something physical with his own eyes. "He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures." (pg 391) During the time of this writing it was the norm that men dominated women. Women were to be seen but not heard. They were not to argue with men, so she was forced to do as he said. Her husband has forbidden her to "work" until she is well again. (pg 392) She is held prisoner in her bedroom and has nothing to do to keep her mind active except stare at the wallpaper, although she did sneak in writing in her journal when possible.
Schizophrenia in The Yellow Wallpaper. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s "The Yellow Wall-Paper," does more than just tell the story of a woman who suffers at the hands of 19th century quack medicine. Gilman created a protagonist with real emotions and a real psych that can be examined and analyzed in the context of modern psychology. In fact, understanding the psychology of the unnamed protagonist is well on the way to understanding the story itself. " The Yellow Wall-Paper," written in first-person narrative, charts the psychological state of the protagonist as she slowly deteriorates into schizophrenia (a disintegration of the personality).
John is a physician and is, “ practical to an extreme” (Gilman, 269). The husband does not think that the wife and narrator is sick and believes that she has a nervous depression. Instead of the wife deciding what is best for her the men in her life decide what she is going to be doing despite the fact that they believe nothing is wrong with her. These actions start her decent into madness. John starts her by cutting her off to the world and her writing. Writing was the one thing that really made her and connected to herself. He locks her in a room by herself all day and expects her to get well. Back in this time, the society had a thing called a “rest cure”, this cure was used on the narrator and other women in society that would be apparently have long-term negative effects on them. As she is locked away from her child she is treated as one. They put her in a nursery, which is the scene of the yellow wallpaper. Readers get the sense that the husband John did not know that this was going to have these effects on his wife but they are unaware because women are not that important in this society. As the narrator becomes increasingly more mad the audience begins to realize that the narrator is faulty. She no longer has the ability to connect with the
Schizophrenia is not a new mental disorder. Through written documents, it can be traced to the Pharaoh days in Egypt and even further back to the second millennium before Christ. The disease was first identified as a mental illness by German psychiatrist Dr. Emile Kraepelin in 1887. Kraepelin, identified by H.J. Eysenck's Encyclopedia of Psychology as the founder of modern scientific psychiatry, psychopharmacology and psychiatric gene, was the first to make a distinction in the psychotic disorders between what he called dementia praecox and manic depression. He believed that dementia praecox was primarily a disease of the brain, and particularly a form of dementia. Kraepelin named the disorder 'dementia praecox' (early dementia) to distinguish it from other forms of dementia (such as Alzheimer's disease) which typically occur late in life. It wasn’t until 1911 when Swiss psychiatrist, Eugen Bleuler, coined the term "schizophrenia". Bleuler changed the name to schizophrenia because Kraepelin's name was misleading as the illness was not a dementia (it did not always lead to mental deterioration) and could occur late in life as well as early. Schizophrenia" comes from the Greek roots schizo (split) and phrene (mind) to describe the fragmented thinking of people with the disorder. He was also the first to describe the symptoms of schizophrenia as "positive" or "negative." Both Bleuler and Kraepelin subdivided schizophrenia into categories, based on symptoms and prognosis. There are five types described in the DSM-III: disorganized, catatonic, paranoid, residual, and undifferentiated. The first three categories were originally proposed by Kraepelin. The DSM- III stands for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders whic...
Schizophrenia is a psychiatric disorder which causes people with this disorder to misinterpret reality. It is one of the top ten causes of long-term disability. Schizophrenia patients may hear voices that may not be there, they will believe that people are out to harm them, reading their minds, and controlling their thoughts. Because they have these feelings a person can become withdrawn and paranoid. The name schizophrenia leads us to believe that the illness causes a person to have a split personality. This was the old way of thinking about the illness, but it is not the case today. Although the causes of schizophrenia are still not determined data suggest that environmental, social, and genetic factors can play a part in developing the illness. People with schizophrenia develop this illness around the ages 16 and 30 years old. The illness does not develop quickly. Onset is gradual and subtle and usually takes places over a course of five years.
What is Schizophrenia? Schizophrenia is brain disorder that makes it hard to see the difference between reality and imagination, have normal emotional responses, and act normal in social situations. Schizophrenia is relatively young, it has only been around for less than 100 years. It was first discovered by Dr. Emile Kraeplin in 1887. He believed it was a mental illness. A few documents take Schizophrenia’s origins back to Egypt during the Pharaoh’s rule around 1550 B.C. People originally thought schizophrenia was simply madness, and usually associated it with madness, even though it is quite different from madness. Symptoms of this disease include Positive symptoms, which are: hallucinations, or things that someone can see, feel, smell, or hear that do not really exist. Many people hear voices inside their heads, see people that are not there, or smell odors no one else smells. Delusions are another symptom, also known as bizarre beliefs, these may include paranoid delusions also, which are delusions that tell the person that others are trying to hurt them. Thought Disorders are a symptom in which the person thinks unusually or dysfunctionally. Movement disorders may be present in schizophrenic people, they may seem like twitches or small, sharp, and sudden movements. Schizophrenia’s “negative symptoms” are harder to recognize. These include the flat affect, in which the persons face doesn’t move and the voice is droning. The lack of pleasure in life is another once, along with the lack of ability to start and sustain activities, and little speech. These symptoms prevent or block the person from living a normal life because they cause social, physical, and emotional, and mental problems. This may lead to psychosis, insanity, or ...
Schizophrenia is a common disease; it is a serious disorder of the mind and bran but is actually very treatable it actually ranks in the top 10 causes of disability in developed countries worldwide. Schizophrenia is a completely brain based disorder, that causes hallucinations, and affects multiple brain functions, like the thinking clearly, managing how you feel, making decisions and how to relate to other people. People with schizophrenia also have to face illusions daily, which are very vivid false beliefs, which might cause them to think that people are following them or looking directly at them. Schizophrenia is a horrible disorder for the majority of people who face it, and very can also be enormously costly for families and even society in general. Even though it is treatable there is no current cure for schizophrenia the only thing now is that it must be managed through therapy. There are over fifteen modern medications for that could treat schizophrenia that were developed by different biotechnology and pharmaceutical businesses. The costs from schizophrenia was estimated to be in the range of $61.7 billion, and $22.6 billion direct health care costs in 2011. The most accepted theory of why people have schizophrenia is that it’s result of a simply genetics from the environmental exposures and stress during pregnancy or childhood are what generally causes the disorder to form. Researchers note several key strand genes that when damaged seem to create a pre problem or increase for the risk of schizophrenia. The genes, in mixture with known environmental exponentials are thought to be the reason that it is a result in schizophrenia. The genes that are projected to enhance the risk of obtaining schizophrenia are the Dysbin...
The narrator is trying to get better from her illness but her husband “He laughs at me so about this wallpaper” (515). He puts her down and her insecurities do not make it any better. She is treated like a child. John says to his wife “What is it little girl” (518)? Since he is taking care of her she must obey him “There comes John, and I must put this away, he hates to have me write a word”. The narrator thinks John is the reason why she cannot get better because he wants her to stay in a room instead of communicating with the world and working outside the house.
“In the time you can read this sentence, eight acres of tropical rain forest will have been bulldozed and burned out of existence” (Bloyd 49). However, this destruction has been neglected and overlooked for years. Many people do not understand the long-term consequences of losing the earth’s rain forests. The rain forests have provided people with many natural resources and medicines. The benefits that rain forests provide to people will be destroyed if the depletion continues to be disregarded.
Although the forests provide human benefits such as paper, too much of the forests are being cut down to satisfy human needs. “Some 46-58 million square miles of forest are lost each year- equivalent to 36 f...
People are deforesting the planet for thousands of years, primarily to clear land for crops or stock. though tropical forests square measure for the most part confined to developing countries, they square measuren’t simply meeting native or national needs; economic economic process means the wants and desires of the worldwide population are bearing down on them also. Direct causes of deforestation square measure agricultural growth, wood extraction (e.g., work or wood harvest for domestic fuel or charcoal), and infrastructure growth like road building and urbanization. seldom is there one direct cause for deforestation. Most often, multiple processes work at the same time or consecutive to cause deforestation.The single biggest direct cause of tropical deforestation is conversion to cropland and pasture, mostly for subsistence, which is growing crops or raising livestock to meet daily needs. The conversion to agricultural land usually results from multiple direct factors. For example, countries build roads into remote areas to improve overland transportation of goods. The road development itself causes a limited amount of deforestation. But roads also provide entry to previously inaccessible—and often unclaimed—land. Logging, both legal and illegal, often follows road expansion (and in some cases is the reason for the road expansion). When loggers have harvested an area’s valuable timber, they move on. The roads and the logged areas become a magnet for settlers—farmers and ranchers who slash and burn the remaining forest for cropland or cattle pasture, completing the deforestation chain that began with road building. In other cases, forests that have been degraded by logging become fire-prone and are eventually deforested by repea...
The depletion of tropical rainforests by third world countries, as well as by American industry, has been a growing area of concern for many environmental organizations. Animal rights activists are livid at the frightening rate in which species are becoming extinct in these regions. Conservationists argue that the foliage is disappearing at rates that replanting programs will never be able to compete with. Environmentalists and Meteorologists fear that the elimination of enormous quantities of acreage will result in a long list of problems, including global warming, abnormal precipitation patterns, and unpredictable weather systems, just to name a few. While many of these adverse effects to the regional ecosystems and to the planet as whole may not be evident right away, studies show that if the rate at which these forests are harvested or burned continues as is they will happen eventually. The intent of this paper is to focus on some of the environmental concerns with regard to their causes, the long term effects, and what can and should be done to prevent them.
John is afflicted with paranoid hallucinations; by the time he is taken to a mental hospital under the care of the mysterious Dr. Rosen, he is diagnosed as having an advanced case of schizophrenia.
Why do we use the method of deforestation in our society today is the most common question that is asked. The reasons for us cutting down trees vary for di...
State of the Forests (n.d.) World Rainforest Movement. Retrieved on January 30, 2007 from www.org.uy