Gilbert Grape Mental Illness

This movie takes place in Endora, a small town in Iowa, and it shows us the life of Gilbert Grape, who is 24 years old young man who takes care of his whole family. During the movie, we learned that Gilbert has to deal with some family issues, besides his own, and how he manages his time to do it. First, the movie introduces Arnie, Gilbert’s younger brother, who suffers from autism and it is noticeable that Gilbert looks after him for everything. After that, Gilbert starts talking about the rest of his family, and he mentions that he has two sisters and another brother who went away for college. Then, when he starts talking about his parents, we learned that his dad died and that his mom is an obese woman with depression as consequence of her

Bonnie Grape suffers from a mood disorder, specifically a major depressive disorder. This condition is known for having constant feelings of sadness and lackness of interest in activities, which eventually lead to other mental and physical symptoms. Some other symptoms that affect a person’s mood are anxiety and discontent feelings of themselves, which affect an individual’s self-esteem by feeling worthless or guilty. Additionally, it affects the individual's body in physical ways by having significant weight gain or weight loss, fatigue, loss or energy, and insomnia (not being able to sleep properly) or hypersomnia (sleeping too much). Furthermore, it affects a person’s cognitive functions, and this can be shown by having lack of concentration, and by being slow to perform activities. A person’s behavior also changes, and they experience symptoms like psychomotor agitation or retardation, excessive crying, and being socially isolated. Finally, having recurrent death and suicidal thoughts can be a depression symptom. In order to be medically diagnosed with a major depressive disorder, a person must experienced or show 5 or more of these symptoms almost every day for more than 2

Grape to self-esteem problems. Additionally, she lost interest in doing normal activities and she performed the basic ones very slowly to the point that she ended up letting her older children to take care of the youngest ones and herself. This was a serious problem to Mrs. Grape because she got to the point where she didn’t wanted to go upstairs to her bedroom, and ended up eating, sleeping and passing her whole day watching TV, all of this sitting down in her couch. Another reason that she didn’t wanted to leave the house was because she didn’t wanted people to see her and start talking about her, which made her socially isolated. This can be shown almost at the end of the movie when she went to the sheriff’s office to ask them to release Arnie, and after everyone stared at her and make fun of her appearance, she decided not to leave the house during Arnie’s birthday party; she was even ashamed of been presented to Gilbert’s