Electroconvulsive Therapy Essay

The Bell Jar: Beyond the Title Each day with depression is a war in one’s own mind, with every decision being a new battle to fight. Even getting out of bed can be an activity that takes up most of one’s energy when coping with this disorder. Depression is no novel mental illness-- between the multi-million dollar Cymbalta commercials and the movement to destigmatize mental illness as a whole, there are few who do not have at least a basic understanding of what the disorder entails for those that

Of the two readings we were given to select from for our Midterm Assignment, I chose to conduct my initial psychosocial and diagnostic assessment on the character, Esther, from the semi-autobiographical novel “The Bell Jar”, by Sylvia Plath. The protagonist in the novel is a 19-year-old girl from the suburbs of Boston growing up in the 1950’s who has accepted a summer internship working at a prominent magazine in New York City. It is made clear from the beginning of the novel that Esther’s move

Dead from Inside Suicide was a major problem among many generations of teens that grew up in brutal societies. In the 1950s, suicide was not widely mentioned, and many people suffered without any treatments. In the novel The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath, Esther tried to kill herself multiple times. Her life was planned by the society, and she was pressured into fitting in with others. Esther’s mental problems took over her life, and caused her to lose out on her teen years. She was a successful college

Mental illness is one of the most sought-after themes that has often been explored and represented in literature over a remarkably wide variety of writings. The various factors that threaten a character’s sanity can range from all those traumatic occurrences and events, or a combination of a number of long and short-term factors that may trigger the character’s decline into pressure, from several vast and impersonal sources. Also, very rarely does this threatened character succeed or emerge from

which began when Plath was a guest editor in the Mademoiselle magazine (Wagner-Martin, 2003: 33). Connie Ann Kirk holds that the depression led to her first unsuccessful suicide attempt, which happened in August 1953 (Kirk, 2009: 78). After electroconvulsive treatment, Plath showed signs of recovery and soon after that she went back to Smith College to continue her studies. After Plath finished her studies in Smith College, she was accepted to Cambridge University on Fulbright scholarship where she

Sylvia Plath is a writer renowned for her intense and personal poems. But she is also known for her semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, a work very lightly veiled as fiction. In the coming-of-age book “The Bell Jar”, Plath takes us into the mind of the 19-year old narrator, Esther Greenwood, and her descending into the grip of mental illness. Set in the 1950s, Esther is a bright and aspiring writer working as an intern for a busy magazine in New York along with fellow college students. Her

Sylvia Plath uses many literary devices to convey her purpose in The Bell Jar such as symbolism. The Bell Jar itself is used as symbolic representation of the emotional state Esther is in. The glass jar distorts her image of the world as she feels trapped under the glass. It represents mental illness; a confining jar that descends over her mind and doesn’t allow her to live and think freely. Symbols of life and death pervade The Bell Jar. Esther experiences psychological distress which is a major

Mirikitani. Sylvia Plath was a troubled poet; throughout her life she had dealt with major depression. During college she attempted to put an end to her life by taking sleeping pills; she was placed in a mental institute and was treated with electroconvulsive shock treatment. A few years later after graduating from college she got married to a fellow poet, Ted Hughes. Four years later, Hughes and Plath had their first child followed by their second child two years after. After seven years of marriage

Depressions often personified as a villain that traps people and does not let them go. This is a claim most of its victims would agree with, especially Esther Greenwood. The Bell Jar, written by the Sylvia Plath, follows Esther Greenwood’s descent into and recovery from madness. Esther is a young and brilliant writer, whose ambitions are stunted by a crippling depression. Plath, describes an outlook on reality that is distorted by mental illness through the symbolism of the fig tree and the bell

depression. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath shows how one particular type of treatment, electro shock therapy, was used to help the main character, Esther, overcome her depression. Sylvia Path’s novel shows how electro shock was not very effective for Esther and the other patients that received it. There were other treatments that could have been done to help out Esther with her depression. Electroshock therapy (ECT) is a type of medical treatment that is used to treat severe depression. It is to be used