Dutch immigrant to Canada relates how she endured depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder (called manic depression in her time) in her book.
Most people who suffer from mental disorder find it difficult to share their ordeal, let alone write a book about it. However, one woman believes it’s a subject worth talking about, especially from a personal perspective. To offer hope and comfort to individuals and families in need, Tilly Dunn wrote Thinking Exit Stage Left: From Suicidal to Imaginative Moving Forward with a Healthy Mind (Balboa Press, 2015).
Dunn revealed her experience with duality at an early age due to her unique family set-up and upbringing. Although it caused her no confusion, it made her depressed when she migrated to Canada
Did you know 1 in 5 Canadians will experience some form of mental illness. Some will experience it to a greater degree than others. Anise, the main character of the book Gravity Journal by Gail Sidonie Sobat, is one of many one in five. She has anorexia and depression and is hospitalized for the second time because of it. She spends her hospital stays in ward 4-psych-o, a very ironically named ward.
Mental illness is a complicated and mysterious subject for most of the world. Depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, and OCD are a few common mental illnesses. Nancy Xia takes you through her journey with severe depression in the book Leap. She reveals how depression effects her entire life including the lives of the people that love her the most. Throughout this short book, I felt Nancy Xia's pain and despair as well as her parent's stress, love, and sadness.
I believe that we are living in a world where more and more people are diagnosed with different types of depression. Women in particular may feel lifeless, empty, apathetic, and sad. Depression genuinely end up hindering with one’s work, study, eat, and sleep. In the story such as “The Yellow Wall-paper,” written by Charlotte Gilman in 1892, goes into depth about the protagonist experiencing a type of depression. Other than the fact that it is a woman, the name of the protagonist never appear in the story.
Depression is a war. It occurs without warning, growing until it is rampaging, unstoppable and tumultuous. It takes innocent people's lives without any notice, killing them off by the masses. Seemingly endless, it rages on, tearing apart families through the sickening, desolate destruction. The soldiers-merely schoolboys- pick up a gun, not knowing what it means to take a life.
This is the case with Susanna, who is the autobiographical main character of the book. She provides a perfect reason as to why it is important that mental illness must be talked about more. Susanna is admitted to the McLean Hospital after she attempts suicide and is then diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. She is at first convinced that there is nothing wrong for her, which is something that many patients go through, and is one of the important reasons that mental illness should be discussed more.
This quote shows that even though Mairs sometimes has difficulty accepting her illness, she knows that there is a growing acceptance of people who must deal with the difficulties that she faces. This ultimately lends a hopeful and positive tone to an otherwise serious and depressing section of her essay. This contrast in tone, but general feeling of hope is key to the type of emotions that Nancy Mairs is trying to educate her readers about. Mair is successful in using multiple rhetorical strategies to connect with the reader.
In the story North End Faust by Ed Kleiman, protagonist Alex Markiewicz cannot be solely held responsible for his decision to commit suicide due to societal and personal factors originating from his childhood. However, ultimately whatever life throws at one, it is up to us to decide how best to navigate such challenges. North End Faust tells the story of Markiewics and how his childhood trauma of being locked in a closet by his brother instils in him a fascination with isolation and a desire for control over his mind. This fascination lasts beyond his youth. After becoming a renowned psychologist, Alex starts to return to isolation, his best “friend”, to run experiments on how it works and affects humans.
Sharing Control in Greg Doherty’s “Blackwater Betty Black” The sound of a breakdown may be accompanied by skidding tires and breaking glass or just quiet weeping in the night. In Backwater Betty Black, by Greg Doherty, both sounds are heard. The novel is the story of a jaded psych nurse, Betty Black, who takes a mental patient, Doug Vane, on a road trip that would try anyone’s sanity. Ultimately, the story portrays the relationship between happiness and control. To be happy, Doherty argues, one must be neither too controlling nor too controlled; and sometimes the only way to gain perspective on one’s sense of control is to lose control for a while.
It is evident that change is a natural component in the average person’s life. Some however, are more drastic than others. This is exhibited through the first-person narrator of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wall Paper”, who undergoes a drastic change in her health due to postpartum depression, her relationships with the individuals around her, and her isolation. These changes later develop an internal conflict in the form of a troubling identity plight.
People on medications who suffer from mental illness may not feel like themselves, so many people fear of losing their selves. Bipolar disorder is a mental illness that causes unusual and extreme shifts in a person’s functioning, mood and behavior further conveyed through erratic mood swings. However, the symptoms delusions of grandeur, and racing thoughts get in the way. It’s very important to be understood when dealing with a mental illness, furthermore remember to work out the manic episodes. The author, Adam Haslett, addresses a daily issue battling a disorder in the story “Notes to My Biographer”.
Mary Pipher is a psychologist who focuses her studies on how mental health can be caused by influences in culture and writing. In her chapter, “Writing to Connect,” Pipher shows that writing, in particular, can “share our stories, connect with each other, and influence some aspect of our world” (436). The reader can see her field of study throughout “Writing to Connect” and understand the concepts she introduces. Pipher’s directs her writing to “community groups, schools, and health care professionals” (436). This audience is the majority of recipients of her work she travels to speak about.
An Unquiet Mind Kay Redfield Jamison, an American clinical psychologist and author, published one of her books An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness in 1995. The book, as the title describes, is an emotionally moving memoir documenting Jamison’s life. Jamison has had bipolar disorder, or manic-depressive illness, since young adulthood and An Unquiet Mind unapologetically takes readers through the roller coaster which is her life. Albeit bipolar disorder is hard to understand from an outside perspective, this memoir gives an honest yet informative understanding of Jamison’s personal experience with manic-depressive illness.
Harris and White detail many harsh symptoms of bipolar disorder that will disrupt one’s everyday life. While in a manic state, one can expect to experience excessive joy, heightened energy and sexual tendencies, racing thoughts, distorted judgment, a reduced desire for sleep, rapid speech, a lack of self-control, and increased aggression towards others. There is also a possibility to encounter psychosis, where individuals might be unable to discern fact from fiction. Hallucinations and delusions of grandeur are also common for those experiencing psychosis with their mania. In a depressed state, one might suffer from symptoms such as depression, anxiety, overwhelming guilt, social isolation, fatigue, a lack of an appetite, apathy, and chronic
The story “The Yellow Wallpaper” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1892 shows mental illness through the narrator first hand. The theme in this story is going insane verses loneliness as well as being trapped. These themes are shown through the main character (the narrator of the story) as she works through her own mind, life, and surroundings. First, the theme of the woman’s state of mind is the main focus in this story.
Her quest for an answer to who she is and where she comes from a major hinder in the family system, it affect every family member and no one seem to have benefited to me it was more of a negative affected tearing the family apart cause another member to question themselves in confusion. The questions this concept raised for me in relation to this family are why didn’t the parent expose Avery to other culture except theirs and why when Avery brought up her concern as to who she is and the where she is from, why didn’t the parent offer more resource to help answer the question it is as if the left her to find out the answer all by herself I can't imagine a young person solving this issue alone are even understands the possibilities as to why she was different. This answer my questions as to why genogram is impart to know and why some many mix race children and adults struggle to find a place of belonging even though they might have come from adequate home and give everything that that need to be successful in