Mrs Dalloway Mental Illness Essay

Proper treatment of the mentally ill was not enforced until the late 20th century. People with mental illnesses were mistreated, misdiagnosed, and misunderstood. For centuries, people feared those who had any sort of mental issue. Families were disgraced if they had a disabled child and many of those children were shunned and discarded. In the 18th century, mental asylums were full of people who would be now diagnosed with Autism, PTSD, ADD, ADHD, depression, eating disorders, addiction, hoarders, schizophrenia, anti-socialites, or people who just like to read ‘too much’. Even though mental asylums were finally cleaned up and reformed, people were still afraid and confused by those with mental disorders. People in general did not know how to

Often people will go off to war and have traumatic experiences. After, they become distant, cold-hearted and hostile, they experience nightmares or insomnia, contract severe anxiety and fear, and become emotionally detach from things they used to enjoy. In the novel Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf explores the everyday realities of someone living with PTSD. Septimus Smith, a World War I veteran, is suffering from shell shock. Before the war, Septimus was a young, aspiring poet, but after the war he hated human nature and himself for not being able to feel. His wife, Lucrezia, tried her hardest to be a supportive, loving wife, but can no longer connect with her husband and does not know how to cope with his PTSD. Lucrezia, because of her husband's mental illness, turned from a young, happy wife, to an isolated, depressed one who is constantly worried about her husband. She is understandably unhappy with her life and marriage and tries to ‘fix’ her husband the only way she knows how. Lucrezia asks herself why she must suffer, being married to a man who can no longer love her, “having left Septimus, who wasn’t Septimus any longer, to say hard, cruel, wicked things, to talk to himself, to talk to a dead man” (Woolf 1144). She does not understand what it is like for Septimus and she even says later that other people have been to war and they do not act like this. She can no longer relate to her husband and the PTSD takes over his emotions. When they finally call in a doctor, he cannot help neither, “For he had forty years’ experience behind him; and Septimus could take Dr. Holmes’s word for it--there was nothing whatever the matter with him. And next time Dr. Holmes came he hoped to find Smith out of bed and not making that charming little lady his wife anxious about him” (Woolf 1159). Not only is his wife not understanding him, his doctor tells him to ‘get over it’. He says that adequate