Alex Mccandless Research Paper

The Essay that Is before you is on the metal stability of Alex McCandless during the period of the last two years of his life. To prove that Alex was mentally unstable I need to define the criteria that he will need to fit to be classified as mentally unhealthy or unstable. The Mayo Clinic a respected and internationally renowned hospital defines mental instability as Mental illness refers to a wide range of mental health conditions — disorders that affect your mood, thinking and behavior. Examples of mental disorders include: depression, anxiety disorders, schizophrenia, eating disorders and addictive behaviors. And they list a wide range of symptoms of mental illness Feeling sad or down, Confused thinking or reduced ability to concentrate,

Detachment from reality (delusions), paranoia or hallucinations Inability to cope with daily problems or stress Trouble understanding and relating to situations and to people Alcohol or drug abuse Major changes in eating habits, Sex drive changes Excessive anger, hostility or violence Suicidal thinking. I will go back to this list and connect quotes from the book to prove that Alex was having many of these. For my first Scope I will prove and expand on how he segregated himself from society. The second will be that he through away a successful future and years of work. I will conclude with the fact that he lost the ability to judge the ability of himself and his body leading to his death.

To begin with the first Scope The situation that Alex was in during his adolescence needs to be explained. Alex’s parents were “Billie” and “Walt” McCandless Walt being an accomplished scientist working for NASA and later running his own business. This was Walt's second marriage and he had 6 children before his relationship with Billie . Alex had a younger sister and they were overwhelmingly close she would listen to many of the rants that Alex would have

Because of this along with bad decisions and circumstances he died. The first point that Will be made in this scope is that Alex had been an outstanding student and he had been gifted in academics along with physical Activities. Alex’s father saw great potential in Alex and would have liked to bring that to its fullest potential but never got a chance “Chris had so much natural talent but if you tried to coach him, to polish his skill, to bring out that final ten percent, a wall went up “(Jon Krakauer, 1996) . All of these gifts and work were thrown away the second he decided that he would be taking to the road and eventually traveling to Alaska. The second point that will be made is that Alex’s family was extremely well off in terms of their financial status His father's resume says what is need to be heard Current U.S Department of Defence top secret. A little farther down the page and account of his professional experience begins:” I perform private system design, and associated signal processing, Data reduction and information extraction tasks”. This is what I would see as a very wealthy man and would easily provide for his family. Along with the over one hundred dollars that he had burned in a ritualistic action against society he donated all of the money within his account and donated it to the college that he had been attending the year before. Emptying over 20,000 dollars