Poe Mental Illness

The Reason Behind an Insane Narrator Edgar Allan Poe creates a narrator that descends into madness, providing a reason to search for mental illnesses. Poe’s stories often include a dark, macabre, and unnatural setting that dives into the narrator’s mind, revealing symptoms of mental health disorders. In a story of Poe’s, the unknown narrator presents the symptoms such as aggression, negative thoughts, loss of connection between reality, changes in behavior, violent outbursts, and low tolerance for frustration. In this story, “The Black Cat,” the narrator shows signs of three mental illnesses, which include, alcoholism, dissociative disorder, and intermittent explosive disorder. The first mental illness the narrator presents is alcoholism. The

The narrator admits to feeling different and not normal, this is a symptom of dissociative disorder. As mentioned by the Mayo Clinic, “Dissociative disorders are mental health conditions that involve experiencing a loss of connection between thoughts, memories, feelings, surroundings, behavior and identity. These conditions include escaping from reality in ways that are not wanted and not healthy” (Mayo Clinic). The narrator changes his behavior and identity often in the story in a harmful and unhealthy way, for example, when he physically abuses his cat and wife. The abuse indicates a loss of connection between his thoughts, feelings, surroundings, and reality. The research from the Mayo clinic and the quote from the story display the mental illness, dissociative disorder. The third and final mental illness that is developed by the narrator is one of the several impulse control disorders called Intermittent explosive disorder (IED). The narrator in the short story gets aggravated quickly, while the cat almost makes him

He then has an angry outburst filled with aggression while physically harming the cat. Based on the evidence of the narrator having a low tolerance for frustration and anger outbursts, the mental illness identified seems to be IED. Explained by the Cleveland Clinic, “People with intermittent explosive disorder have a low tolerance for frustration and adversity. Outside of the anger outbursts, they have normal, appropriate behavior. The episodes could be temper tantrums, verbal arguments, physical fights or aggression. Intermittent explosive disorder (IED) involves frequent episodes of impulsive anger that’s out of proportion to the event that triggered it. These outbursts can result in physical harm to the person with an IED, other people or animals” (Cleveland Clinic). The symptoms of IED are low tolerance for frustration and adversity, a behavior that contains anger outburst and sometimes appropriate behavior, aggression, and more. Someone classified as an IED is known to cause physical harm to themselves, others, or animals. In the given quote, the narrator starts with appropriate behavior, then gets angry easily. The quote ends with him having a violent and aggressive