How is mental illness depicted in "The Yellow Wallpaper"?

In this story, mental illness is represented as something that is improperly understood, diagnosed, and treated.  To suggest that a woman who suffers from postpartum depression, for which they did not have a name or concept, should be whisked away from family and friends and confined in solitude to a bedroom is more than ridiculous: it seems tantamount to torture.  The narrator is not allowed to do anything under the "rest cure" pioneered by Weir Mitchell, the doctor referenced in the story.  At the time, it was believed that if a woman exercised her brain too much, her blood would rush there, away from her reproductive organs, and this would throw her bodily functions off-balance.  The rest cure, then, called for perfect and complete "rest": no reading, no writing, no working, really, no thinking.  

Further, to call any mental ailment affecting a woman "hysteria" belittles the problem; it makes it seem as though the woman's constitution is simply weak, her will to improve her health too insignificant.  The narrator's husband, a doctor, also refers to her by diminutive nicknames, calling her things like "blessed little goose," making it apparent that he does not take her or her complaints seriously.  The narrator feels herself to be truly suffering, but she says, "John does not know how much I really suffer.  He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him."  We can see, then, that even the doctor does not take his wife's mental illness seriously. In fact, he makes it a great deal worse by using a treatment that makes no medical sense and by holding opinions about women that cannot be supported.

How is mental illness depicted in "The Yellow Wallpaper"?

The main character in "The Yellow Wallpaper," Jane, is mentally ill. The story, written in first person epistolary style, is rife with dramatic irony because of its unreliable narrator. Readers have to ferret out the true psychological condition from what Jane says and from what she doesn't exactly say.

At the beginning of the story, Jane suffers from what today's mental health professionals would term post-partum depression. The baby isn't mentioned often, but the couple has retained hired help to care for the baby because he makes Jane "so nervous." Jane's husband, a physician, tells her she has "temporary nervous depression" and "a slight hysterical tendency," but "he does not believe [she] is sick." Thus he prescribes various tonics, but the primary therapy is "the rest cure," which means she isn't allowed to do any work or to socialize much.

Under the negative effects of the rest cure, Jane's condition becomes progressively worse through the story, but the reader must glean that information through the sometimes misleading descriptions Jane gives. She begins obsessing about the wallpaper fairly early in the story. Then her depression worsens--she reports that she cries at nothing, and she cries most of the time, except when John is around. She begins to grow confused, saying it takes "great effort for me to think straight." She then begins to hallucinate, seeing things behind the wallpaper, eventually believing that a woman is trapped there.

As her psychosis worsens, she becomes paranoid. She admits she is "getting a little afraid of John," and she suspects Jennie, John's sister, of being false toward her. She becomes manic, hardly sleeping at all at night. Her hallucinations worsen so that she has olfactory hallucinations. She starts to have violent thoughts and actions toward herself and others. All the furniture is removed from her room to prevent her from hanging herself, but she still smuggles a rope into her room somehow. She bites off the corner of the bed frame in anger. She sees creeping women outside now as well as the one in her room.

At the end of the story, she has become completely psychotic and dissociated, believing that she is now the woman behind the wallpaper, and she refers to herself (Jane) in the third person and doesn't recognize her husband. 

The story shows that ignorance and shame regarding mental illness causes doctors and family members to recommend therapy that actually worsens the condition.  

Explain how the woman loses touch with reality and becomes insane in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper."

The narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper loses touch with reality because of the cure that she is prescribed for her depression. The treatment, which is based on the so-called "rest cure" by nineteenth century neurologist S. Weir Mitchell, requires the woman to abstain from all intellectual activity and simply rest. The woman therefore becomes a captive to the treatment which ends up by worsening her condition rather than improving it. The condition of complete inactivity causes her to have hallucinations and see a woman trapped in the yellow wall-paper of the room where the narrator is to rest. This imaginary woman mirrors the entrapment experienced by the narrator.

The assumptions on women's behavior in late nineteenth century American society play an important part in reducing the narrator to mental insanity. Women were considered male properties; thus, the narrator cannot make her own choice about her treatment, but has to comply with what her husband and her doctor impose on her. The rest cure itself was based on the conviction that intellectual stimulations were wrong for women. This reveals how women were still considered as children to be taken care of rather than individuals.

How does Charlotte Perkins Gillman present madness in 'The Yellow Wallpaper'?

In addition to merehughes excellent answer, I would just like to add that perhaps one of the reasons Gilman was able to depict madness with such a chilling accuracy is that she herself was subjected to the "rest cure" of her protagonist in the story.

After the birth of her first child in 1887, Gilman suffered from what we would now (hopefully) recognize as post-partum depression.  Severe cases were called "hysterics" (interesting to note, the term only applied to women...the uterus was thought to be the offending organ, hence the term "hysterectomy" for its removal.)

Gilman spent several months in bed and nearly lost her mind. One would think that such a practice has gone the way of the horse and buggy, but this is not so.  There is a wonderful story in the NY Times revealing its continued prevalance.  Sarah Bilston writes that bed rest... "is a standard means of treating just about any pregnancy-related problem in the United States. Indeed, doctors prescribe it for about one in five of all pregnant women, or around 750,000 women a year."

As a result, many women today continue to identify with Gilman's story of a woman pushed to the edge. 

How does Charlotte Perkins Gillman present madness in 'The Yellow Wallpaper'?

In the short story "The Yellow Wallpaper", the main character descends into madness.  Madness is presented in the story as a 'woman's' complaint and indeed the doctors and the main character's husband cite her hysteria as being the cause. She is forbidden to read or write or otherwise engage herself intellectually. The belief at that time was that intellectual pursuits could be a cause of madness or depression in women.

If one looks closely into the story, one can see that the narrator is projecting her  boredom and frustration onto the wallpaper.  She is imprisoned by her role in society at the time and so she projects the image of woman trapped in the wallpaper to express her own feelings.

How is mental illness depicted in "The Yellow Wallpaper"?

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” we watch a woman's slow descent into insanity due to inappropriate treatment for her “nervous condition.” Let's explore this in more detail.

The narrator is experiencing anxiety, a nervous condition that makes it difficult for her to cope with her life. Since she has an infant son, we can assume that this is probably a form of post-partum depression. Her husband, a doctor, takes her to a country house and prescribes rest. She is to take fresh air, good food, and lots of down time.

This may sound nice, but Gilman makes it clear that there is a downside to the husband's recommendation. He prevents his wife from having visitors, caring for their child, and engaging in any sort of work, especially her writing. He also chooses the room they sleep in and insists that they remain there, even when the narrator expresses her dislike of the room — especially its wallpaper.

The narrator is bored stiff. She writes anyway, hiding her work from her husband. She wants to work and be around people, but her husband will not listen to her or take her concerns into consideration. In her boredom, the narrator becomes fixated on the wallpaper in her bedroom. As she stares at the swirling pattern, she begins to imagine a woman behind the wallpaper, trying to get out. Her imagination becomes an obsession; soon, she identifies with the woman.

The narrator's behavior becomes more and more paranoid and erratic. She begins to creep around the room and tear off the wallpaper, trying to free the woman inside. By the end of the story, she believes that she is the woman, free at last from her wallpaper prison. Now, however, she is trapped in a new prison — her own mind. She has gone completely insane as a result of her husband's “treatment.”

How does the author convey madness in the short story 'The Yellow Wallpaper'?

The madness in this excellent short story is conveyed through the peculiar obsession that the narrator has with the yellow wallpaper that covers her bedroom walls and which she comes to relate with more and more. As she stares again and again at this pattern, she comes to see a woman, or many women, behind the wallpaper, seemingly pushing against it and trying to get out. Note how she describes this sight:

The front pattern does move--and now wonder! The woman behind shakes it!

Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over.

The madness is conveyed through the narrator's increasing identification with this woman, until, at the very end of the story she identifies so strongly with her that she becomes that woman, walking around and around the edge of her room, physically expressing the mental and psychological entrapment she has experienced.

How does "The Yellow Wallpaper" address mental health and patient involvement in treatment?

To begin, the validity of the narrator's experience of mental illness is questioned by her husband, who is also her physician. She tells us in the opening paragraphs that he "laughs at [her]," and she expresses her belief that she does not get well more quickly because he "does not believe [she is] sick!" She asks, rather resignedly, "What can one do?" The narrator's illness is downplayed, and she is told that it does not exist; there is simply no way she would be asked to participate in a treatment plan because her doctor/husband is too busy trying to convince her that she is imagining her illness. Her husband, John, tells all of the narrator's friends and relations that she only has a "temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency," and her brother, also a doctor, says the same thing. Told that she is overreacting or making something out of nothing, she says,

I take phosphates or phosphites—whichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise, and am absolutely forbidden to "work" until I am well again. Personally, I disagree with their ideas. Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.

Instead of being allowed to help determine the best course of treatment, however, the narrator is essentially locked into a room at the top of the house, forbidden to see family or friends—even when she specifically requests it—and prevented from employing her obviously intelligent mind by either reading or writing. The narrator's considerable vocabulary helps us to understand what a critical mind she has. For example, when describing the wallpaper in her room, she says,

I know a little of the principle of design, and I know this thing was not arranged on any laws of radiation, or alternation, or repetition, or symmetry, or anything else that I ever heard of. Looked at in one way each breadth stands alone, the bloated curves and flourishes—a kind of "debased Romanesque" with delirium tremens—go waddling up and down in isolated columns of fatuity.

In the absence of any other mental stimulation, this clearly intelligent woman is forced to ponder whatever is available to her: the terrible wallpaper. If she could devote her mind to the things that she enjoys, if she could read and write, or if her husband did not insist on "complete rest," then it seems quite likely that she would improve. One of the great ironies of this story is the fact that the "cure" actually makes her much more ill. Initially, she seems to have what we would now call postpartum depression, but, by the end of the story, she no longer recognizes her own identity and has taken on a fictitious new one that she has imagined. If this is the result of the "cure" suggested by the medical community, which never even validates the patient's own feelings let alone takes into account the patient's input about her treatment, we can only conclude that patient involvement is necessary in order to best serve the patient.