How Did Sylvia Plath Commit Suicide

Every day, there is an average of one hundred twenty three people who commit suicide (“Suicide”). Statistically, females intend to end their lives twice as often as men do, (“Suicide”) and Sylvia Plath succeeded in ending her life. Suicide has been a problem for ages, and unfortunately increases yearly. Looking through the eyes of suffering and pain in The Bell Jar, readers are welcomed into Sylvia Plath’s world of a depressing life, the 1900s, and her mental illness.

Knowing about Sylvia Plath’s life will aid readers by allowing them to understand how The Bell Jar is parallel to her life. Born on October 27, 1932 in Boston, Massachusetts (“Sylvia”). Her parents Otto Emil Plath and Aurelia Schober Plath were not very involved with her life

Esther in the novel and Sylvia Plath and Esther, in The Bell Jar, have social anxiety like nobody can imagine. She goes through life constantly feeling unstable and uncomfortably sad. As one can see, Plath suffers from great levels of depression and anxiety. Struggling with a mental illness feels like, “I can't sleep. I can't read. I tried to speak in a cool, calm way, but the zombie rose up in my throat and choked me off” (“Plath”). Her depression puts her in a state of constant pain, daily. Her mental illness turns her into someone she never would have thought she would be: “I felt myself melting into the shadows like the negative person I’d never seen before in my life” (“Plath”). She did not know who she was anymore, she felt empty and lost. She tried shock therapy and psychological therapy, but her depression would not dissolve. Plath has gotten worse over the years; “Plath suffered periods of extreme mental instability…” (Matthews). Her mind was not in the right place throughout her life, and has made it difficult to live a normal life. Another life struggle that Plath went through is, she was not wealthy, and neither was her family (“The Bell Jar”). She struggled to pay for college but luckily got a scholarship, but with her depression, she still was very stressed out and worried. She never credited herself for the positive input she left, but she was the first person to win the Posthumous

On top of Plath’s dreadful depression, losing her father made every aspect of her life worse. She imagined that she, “killed him,” this is an effect of having high depression. When an individual is suicidal, it feels to them that everything is their fault, the same way Sylvia Plath did with her father. Plath said herself, “‘I was nothing,’ she explained. ‘A zero”’ (Steiner 44). As a result of all the heart wrenching events that occured in her life, her self esteem continued to descend. She felt vulnerable and dislikes living the life she lives, Sylvia Plath was emotionally distraught, angry, and hostile her whole life (Reiff 20). Sadly, Plath attempted suicide multiple times throughout her lifetime. A few of the many trials consisted of, “I unscrewed the bottle of pills and started taking them swiftly, between gulps of water, one by one” (Plath 189). Sylvia Plath is an amazing woman, but her depression took over and left her to nothing. She felt unbearable sadness all of her life, and that wore her down to nothing. She ended up taking her life by placing her head in an oven, for a slow and painful death. Before her suicide occurred, she was entered into a insane asylum, which was her mother's choice. This was not an ideal fix to Plath because she knew that, “The more hopeless you were, the further away they hid you” (Plath 179). She felt vulnerable and sad in the asylum, “And I thought how my mother and