Mental Illness In The Silver Linings Playbook By Matthew Quick

Mental illness refers to a wide range of mental health conditions. They are disorders that affect how a person thinks, feels and acts. The Silver Linings Playbook by Matthew Quick shows the background of someone living with a mental illness. This book distributes and humanizes what Quick describes as the “mental health community”. Quick portrays mental illness realistically through the main characters because Quick himself suffered from depression and anxiety and hopes that a conversation about mental illness could be started (“Oscar Nominated”). Matthew Quick was an admired english teacher in South Jersey. At the age of 30, he quit his teaching job and began writing in his in-laws basement for three years in Massachusetts. Quick grew up in a blue collar neighborhood outside of Philadelphia where they did not have a vocabulary. He didn’t even know he suffered from depression since high school and college and

He wasn’t happy with his life and his marriage was suffering, A big part of his depression was that he wasn’t doing the things he wanted to do and felt trapped. He had a house and tenure but that was not enough. He worked with kids diagnosed with severe autism and at night he worked at a lock-down facility with people who had brain trauma and all kinds of mental illness. Those experiences and his own depression helped him come up with Pat Peoples. Although Pat Solitano is a fictional character, he is somewhat similar to Matthew Quick. Medication is not the only thing that helps a person with mental illness. Pat exercises and dances to improves his mental illness and it helps him forget about the problems with his dad. Quick loves to write which saves him everyday and it also improves his mental illness. Pat lived with his parents after getting out of a Psychiatric hospital and Quick lived with his in-laws basement after quitting his teaching