The Yellow Wallpaper Essay

With today’s medicinal advancements, a mental illness diagnosis, while daunting, is still treatable. The medical community furthers in its understanding of the brain, and a patient is able to receive the tools and resources necessary to live a happy life. Such an optimistic point of view is fairly new. During the Victorian age, a mental illness diagnosis was nearly equivalent to being convicted of a crime. Though significant progress had been made in making mental institutions more available, these prison-like buildings often gave way to horrible living conditions and inhumane treatment of the ill (Sutton 666). In an attempt to avoid such maliciousness, the narrator’s husband in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” takes his assumed hysterical wife to a secluded house so she may begin the recovery process. Unfortunately, lack of knowledge about the brain during this time led to a treatment that furthered schizophrenic tendencies in the

The causes can range from “genes, the environment, and different brain chemistry and structure” (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 6). The criteria include: “characteristic symptoms, social or occupational dysfunction, duration of six months, schizoaffective and mood disorder exclusion, substance or general mood condition exclusion, and relationship to global developmental delay or autism spectrum disorder.” Symptoms are defined as “delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech, grossly disorganized or catatonic behavior, and negative symptoms (i.e., diminished emotional expression or avolition).” Of these, delusions, hallucinations, or disorganized speech must be present (Tandon 5). Symptoms begin to show “between ages sixteen and thirty” (4). While mental illnesses share many of the same tendencies and symptoms, schizophrenia is different in the hallucinations and