The Perks of Being a Wallflower: Depression

The popular Disney film, Beauty and the Beast, the beloved character, Beast, seems to have the characteristics of depression, and learned helplessness. Martin Seligman began an experiment of shocking dogs in 1956. His study involved evaluating the reaction to a dog being allowed to escape during being shocked. Some of these animals were classically conditioned to associate the ringing of a bell to a shock given. Within the next few experiments, the dogs would either run away at the sound of a bell or show a fear related behavior. For some of the dogs used in the experiment, although get could escape the enclosure from a shock, they didn't, they just sat there and took the pain; Seligman explained this as being “Learned Helplessness”.

After assessing my nuclear and extended family using a genogram, it was apparent that a history of mental illness was a pattern within my paternal extended family. My family never went to therapy, but I truly think that it would have been beneficial throughout my childhood and teenage years. Solution-focused therapy, narrative therapy, and intergenerational therapy and three therapies that can aide families in healing processes from lack of unity, communication, and negative patterns.

Throughout his diary entries, Charlie demonstrates an emotional attachment to his Aunt Helen. Although Charlie isn’t aware, Aunt Helen is in his subconscious: the part of the mind that an individual is not aware of but influences one's actions. According to Charlie, his aunt is his favorite person in the world. Aunt Helen lived under her sister's roof for her last few years of life after living a dreadful life. This woman was formerly molested by a family friend and when she revealed this information to her parents, the suffering didn’t stop because they saw it as a false claim and continued inviting this man over. This traumatic event led to an overuse of drugs, the frequent reentry to a hospital, a jobless life, and lastly the repeated sexual abuse of a young version of Charlie. Charlie develops a form of

Hannah Bailey is a young, wild, and carefree teenager from a small town called Warsaw, Indiana. She attends Warsaw Community High School and she likes music, art, and photography. Majority of the students at the school are Caucasian and most of them are in cliques, relationships, and are somewhat popular. People call Hannah weird and say that she does not fit in with everyone. She wants to go to college in California to study film. Hannah lives with her grandmother because her mother suffers from depression and is not in the home, and her father works out of town in Ohio. Hannah’s boyfriend, Joel, is also a big part of her life. She spends a lot of her time with him. For Hannah, Erik Erikson’s Psychosocial Development Theory can be used to help explain her adolescent life.

In both Steven Chbosky and J.D. Salinger’s coming of age novels ‘The Perks of Being a Wallflower’ and ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ both authors successfully explore the idea of entering adulthood as an outsider. The Perks of Being a Wallflower follows a fifteen-year-old boy, Charlie. Charlie has recently lost his best friend Michael to suicide and is struggling to come to terms with his death. He is in his freshman year of high school and struggles to fit in socially, until he meets a group of seniors who take him under their wing and introduce him to a world he could never imagine. Written in the form of a series of letters to an anonymous recipient, Chbosky allows the audience to have an in-depth perception of Charlies mind and his struggles with mental illness. Similarly, with The Catcher in the Rye, the story is narrated by a young man called Holden. Holden is also known as an outsider who struggles to fit in socially and struggles with mental health issues. Salinger explores the ideas of the struggles of growing up in a contemporary world. The use of perspective, stylistic features, and contexts help the authors to convey this idea. This report explores how the authors successfully use these techniques.

The yellow wallpaper was an assortment of journal entries written by a woman who has been confined into a room by her physician husband who is certain that she is suffering from temporary nervous breakdown, when she is suffering from postpartum depression. She is prescribed the “rest cure”, usually the only remedy used for women who had “slight hysteric tendencies” and depression. The label “slight hysteric tendencies” points out that this is not seen as an important issue but rather taken very lightly. It is also very ironic as her condition is not very light, as towards the end she completely loses it and goes insane. She starts to see crying women trapped in the wallpaper and spend most of her time thinking about it. She somehow sees herself

The psychodynamic paradigm alone cannot explain the entire origin of one’s psychological problems. Interpersonal and familial conflicts could contribute to depression, but may not be the direct cause. Therefore, any psychological paradigm alone will normally not be successful to describe one’s depressive symptoms. When

Charlie, a fifthteen year old who lives in Pittsburgh, PA, loses his best friend Michael, who commits suicide. Charlie is starting high school, so to deal with his anxiety, he starts writing letters. He starts writing letters to an anonymous person. He has never met this anonymous person, but he has heard good things about him. “Normally I am very

Furthermore, in a paper titled The Relationship between Child Abuse, Parental Divorce, and Lifetime Mental Disorders and Suicidality in a Nationally Representative Adult Sample, researchers came to the conclusion that children with divorced parents are more likely to acquire a disorder than those with married

Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower demonstrates how ‘Charlie’, the protagonist drives the narrative through his subconscious exploration of his own mother complex and masculine worth. He analyses his past and current personality in his letters to arrive at how his current attitudes, values and beliefs have been shaped through key events that have happened. As the story develops, it is clearly demonstrated through Charlies exploration that Chbosky utilises the theory of Freudian psycho-analytical criticism and masculine theory. The Perks of Being a Wallflower is an American coming of age text; the protagonist, Charlie is starting the journey of high school. Charlie is a socially awkward boy who as the title says; is a wallflower.

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a story set in a 19th century colonial mansion, in which the narrator and her husband stay for the summer. The narrator, who is unnamed, is undergoing a rest cure for some kind of mental illness after giving birth. This mental illness is now known as postpartum depression. Rest cure involves doing absolutely nothing and this triggered the further deterioration of the narrator’s mental health. Her husband, John, monitors her condition while they stay in the mansion. She is confined in a room— supposedly a nursery room— with barred windows and scratches on the floor. The most noticeable feature of the room by the narrator is the yellow wallpaper. Each day, her description of the yellow wallpaper becomes more disturbing; from being just plain wallpaper to being a prison cell for trapped women, shaking the bars, wanting to be free from it. Instead of getting well from the rest cure, the narrator’s mental state worsened as what is depicted in her journal entries. She eventually goes mad and her husband fainted from the sight of her condition.

I believe this because many of my relatives are divorced and long lasting marriages are not very prevalent in my family. I also believe that I could trace a long history of abuse and mental illnesses. I am aware that I have an aunt with mental illness problems. Since, research shows mental health issues are genetic; I would suspect that I have other relatives with the same or similar issues. I believe that abuse is an issue for similar reasons. I also think that I may uncover other genetic health issues that I am unaware

Street, E. & Soldan, J. (1998). A Conceptual framework for the Psychosocial issues faced by families with genetic conditions. Families, Systems & Health, 16, 217 – 232.

feelings can linger for years. Depression is a social disorder characterized by a depressed mood

The Perks of Being a Wallflower is a coming-of-age epistolary novel by using American writer Stephen Chbosky which turned into first published on February 1, 1999, through Pocket Books. Set in the early Nineteen Nineties, the radical follows Charlie, an introverted youngster, through his freshman year of high school in a Pittsburgh suburb. The novel info Charlie’s unconventional style of wondering as he navigates between the worlds of youth and adulthood, and tries to cope with poignant questions spurred through his interactions with each his pals and family.