Hello and welcome back to Jimena’s Mental Manual where I discuss mental health portrayals in literature. This week I’ve been pondering on the topic of recovery when it comes to mental health issues and how unique each situation can be for any individual who suffers from different forms of mental illness. For most people, recovery isn’t linear and can come with many highs and lows. For others, recovery can be a journey of trial and error to see what works best and what does not. I’ve realized how specialized treatment has to be for individuals and why receiving proper treatment for mental illness can be difficult for so many people. In addition, the stigma associated with receiving help, although much improved, is still prevalent in our society. It adds to individuals being fearful to ask for help or to seek treatment because of the stigma surrounding therapy, medication, or psychiatric treatment. This post will contain spoilers for “The Yellow Wallpaper.”
Mothers are one of the main groups that are often overlooked when it comes to mental health treatment. Postpartum is something I don’t see spoken about in the mainstream media or brought up in general within the common population. Mothers who suffer from postpartum mental illness are commonly people who are suffering in silence because the expectation is to put motherhood first. Mothering on its own is already hard enough, but the addition of postpartum depression or anxiety can push an individual over the edge. Seeking proper help and being genuinely heard plus understood can seem almost impossible.
These aspects are depicted in “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The story follows an unnamed woman who is suffering from some form of postpartum depression. In her time, the way that postpartum complications were dealt with was through isolation. The story is told through diary entries from the narrator’s secret diary that she hides from her husband. Her husband is a physician who believes he knows how to cure her, however, she writes repeatedly that her husband doesn’t understand her illness and that this isolation doesn’t make her feel any better. As the story continues, it’s clear that her predictions about her situation are correct and she slowly falls into the insanity that comes with extended periods of isolation.
The narrator begins to fixate on the yellow wallpaper of the room that she is being held in. In the end, her postpartum depression turns into psychosis because of the poor treatment she was given. Her identity slowly becomes stripped as her mental state becomes worse. Lack of understanding to hear her own needs outside of the standards of being a mother is what led to the narrator’s downfall, which I feel can be seen as a parallel to real-life scenarios. Being a mother and being a wife was put before her mental health, as can be seen, day to day. Mothers are told to just push through for the sake of their children. Not only does this story speak volumes about the period in which this story was written, but it can be used as a reflection of how we treat postpartum mental illness today.
Personally, this story had a big impact on how women’s issues are generally viewed even outside of the topics seen in this story. There is always this attitude of inconvenience that brought everything I already knew about women’s issues into a different light. This could also be telling of the way women are often viewed as “crazy” even in times when help is genuinely needed. Postpartum mental issues are very real and much more common than people know, yet it’s something that is often brushed away as a secondary issue.
Jimena Araiza – Asst. Prose Editor, Asst. Layout Editor & Blogger: Jimena is a junior at Lewis University majoring in English with a concentration in Literature and Language. She has a passion for creative fiction and is working to pursue a career in publishing. Outside of school, she works part-time as a cashier at Aldi. Her free time is spent watching movies and is currently into reading lots of dystopian novels. In addition to being a huge bookworm, she has a love for running and participates in road races.