Fung 1 Jennifer Fung Professor Shal 1211 Section 18 October 13th, 2013 The “Promethic” Illness Circling a yellow wallpapered room, sticking your head in the oven, running wildly around town in the nude; these are the visions we associate with when the word madness comes to mind. Entering the taboo world of mental illness, stigmatized as the crazy and psychotic by decades of misunderstanding, Marya Hornbacher takes a step towards reversing those damages by telling her own story in a memoir titled Madness: A Bipolar Life, in an attempt to shed some light and insight on the world of manic depression. She details her struggle with the disease that spawned multitudes of problems for her all throughout her life. To examine how she …show more content…
She depicted this through creating coherent sentences with a focus, content wise and structural wise, sentences with less comma splices. For example the author wrote: “I put myself back in Fung 3 my chair, as if I am a little kid who refuses to eat her peas and is not allowed to leave her place until she finishes every last bite. I take a swig, set the bottle down, and study it as the liquor burns a path down my throat” (124). The sentences are noticeably shorter with no manipulated structure for emphasis, per say contrary to how she portrayed her manic thought. In addition her focus was much more reigned in for she wasn't speeding through unrelated topics and stringing them together into a run on sentence. To speculate, her sentences focused solely on her immediate surroundings, she wrote of sitting in her chair and taking a drink out of her bottle as she described how it felt going down rather than jittering on going up and down, describing the sky, then the land and back again (122). Toying with sentence structure, Marya successfully reproduced the pace of her mental state into her writing. To illuminate how drastic her condition was, the author employed juxtaposition to emphasize the mania. Using a system of extreme contrariety, she effectively exemplified the magnitude of her mental state; the low to dramatize the high. In the previous
Some might have seen her as being a pest or an interruption to the other employees, while others
Forney’s suffering arises not just from the symptoms of her bipolar disorder, but from the self-isolation that results from her fear of losing her creativity. After her diagnosis, Forney characterizes herself as a “rock star” cheerfully eating an energy bar and casually tossing Klonopin into her mouth (28). With the same carelessness, she begins reading Kay Jamison’s memoir, a story by a psychologist who suffers from the same disorder as she. Here, Forney’s face shows a dismissive skepticism, betraying her adamant refusal to let her disorder “dictate everything in [her] life” (27-28). Her reasons for this refusal become readily apparent when we
From now on I will refer to the term “bipolar disorder” as manic-depressive illness. The discovery of watery patches in manic-depressives’ brain tissue was very interesting. It was rational for Kay to be afraid to share her illness with the world, since it could change the way people see her. Also, there are endless traumatic possibilities and it is scary to think that so many disorders go unnoticed. The passages in the memoir flooded me with all kinds of emotions.
The author uses various tools such as semicolons, incomplete sentences, and ellipses. Complete sentences interspersed within these marks actually serve to add to the uneven writing. The choppiness may portray rushing, being distressed, and being careless. Let us look to the first paragraph to analyze the style. The first sentence is incomplete because it lacks a subject.
Virginia Woolf, a woman from a slightly different time than Charlotte Gilman and Weir Mitchell, had Manic-Depressive Psychosis, which according to The Royal Society of Medicine Health Encyclopedia, is a “mood disorder” and the patient could be bi or unipolar (10). Woolf contributes her condition to what happened to her during her childhood, her mother died when Woolf was young, and she said that she was abused by her father and her half-brothers (2). But, according to The Royal Society of Medicine Health Encyclopedia, this “condition” may have been from the characters Woolf created as her characters and stories were a mystery (11). Even though she wasn’t given “The Rest Cure,” she had issues, she kind of diagnosed herself through her writings
In her memoir, “Madness“, Marya Hornbacher takes the reader on a journey of her life with Type I rapid cycle bipolar disorder. She explains the disorder as “when you are mad, mad like this, you don’t know it. Reality is what you see. When what you see shifts, departing from anyone else’s reality, it’s still reality to you” (Hornbacher, page 118).
Allie took a small sip, swished it around in her mouth and then swallowed it. It had a slight burn going down but once in her stomach it settled the butterflies that were there. She took another small sip and repeated the process of swirling and then swallowing.
Her vocal in the first part of her essay was very advanced
“The Yellow Wallpaper” is the most renown short story of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935). It starts as a spine-chilling probably-horror-story that then becomes, even more, terrifying when we realize what extremes human mind can reach when put in inadequate conditions, even without any supernatural elements to interfere. We’ve learned from Charlotte Perkins’ article “Why I Wrote ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’” that there was a lot of speculation held about the motives behind this short story, so she decided to shed some light on it.
This was not necessarily shown in the movie, but she did show signs of extreme irritability surrounding her environment and living conditions. Secondly, during the periods of noticeable elevated levels of energy and mood disturbances, she presented five of the requirements that fell under the first criteria; (1) she became obsessively goal orientated
It is clear that the short story depicts the life of a mental sick woman who is experiencing large depths of
82)This emphasizes the book’s point of saying that some criteria are “abnormally increased activity or energy,” and “flight of ideas or subjective impression that thoughts are racing,” (Kring et al. 2016, p. 140). She mentions that during these episodes that her friends would tell her to slow down (Jamison 1995, p. 37). This can also be considered as the symptom characterized by unusual talkativeness and rapid speech (Kring et al. 2016, p. 140). According to the textbook, a decreased need for sleep also characterizes mania, which Jamison often refers to, saying that “Decreased sleep is both a symptom of mania and a cause,” (Jamison 1995, p. 69). During her manic episodes, Jamison also had a tendency to dress provocatively and overspend money, which the DSM-5 characterizes as “excessive involvement in activities that are likely to have painful consequences, such as reckless spending, sexual indiscretions, or unwise business investments,” (Kring et al. 2016, p. 140). She also mentions that during one of her manias, she bought snakebite kits because “God had chose me, and apparently only me, to alert the world to the wild proliferation of killer snakes in the Promised Land,” (Jamison 1995, p. 76), which can be classified as the DSM-5 criteria “increased self-esteem; belief that one has special talents, powers, or abilities,” (Kring et al. 2016, p. 140). As for her depressive
During this time of prevalent hysteria women had no political agency, and in comparison to their male counterparts who were given plenty of opportunity and autonomy, women were rendered powerless. Bound by their polite, constricted, and functionally domestic existence. One of the ways in which psychosomatic illness or as defined in the twentieth century; hysteria was manifested as a bodily protest against these inequalities as well as an escape from the exhaustive yet unpaid demands of domestic duties. Jane E. Goldstein explores the plight of women in the nineteenth century in her book, Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century.
“Oh god Howard. I feel so weird! Her voice oddly dropped an octave as she doubled over.” I wished to rush over to her but the judge warned me that with this punishment, I probably would get hurt during the change if she accidentally lashed out so I stayed in my corner, gripping my seat till my knuckles whiten.