Every person’s main goal in life is to be happy but we often find obstacles when we are trying to achieve this. Even when the road to happiness can be really long and tiring because of these obstacles, there are many shortcuts too. One of these shortcuts to happiness is love. The singer Justin Bieber says in one of his songs “everybody is looking for love”, and it could not be more true. Finding someone who you love and that loves you back, and is wants to spend the rest of their lives with you can be really helpful and can make people really happy. Like everything, sharing your entire life with someone has its good and bad things. You give your entire life to someone and basically put their happiness before yours, which should not be a problem as long as your partner is doing the same. Relationships are not an easy chore, sometimes people feel like they are tired of each other or like they do not love each other anymore and this can lead to lack or complete stop of support for their partner. In addition to life with their partner, people have also a lot of responsibilities; whether it’s work, household, kids, etc.  These responsibilities cause stress and the accumulation and mix of these, plus a bad love life can have many consequences such as mental illness. 

In the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the narrator and her husband whose name is John, who is also her physician, seem to have a healthy relationship at the beginning of the story.  He is worried about her illness, which has been diagnosed as nervous depression.  John decides that the best remedy for her condition is absolute rest, and gets an enormous house for the summer so that his wife can relax and get away from everything.  It would seem that John’s concern about taking care of his wife’s condition is his main goal.  Actually, what John is doing is like sweeping the dirt under the rug.  Pushing his wife’s problems on the side, and not giving her the support she actually needs to recover.  When her behavior starts to be lead by the mental condition she suffers from, he starts to get tired of dealing with her. Still, John believes that he is doing the right thing to solve her mental condition.  

The narrator herself tries to make the case on her behalf that what she needs is to occupy herself with things, but her husband insists that all she needs is rest and not to do anything.  Her husband’s reluctance to support and keep his wife company, as well as the lack of stimulation of her brain, is what eventually causes the narrator to start losing her mind.

So we have a married couple where the wife finds herself depressed for some reason.  A husband that believes that her depression is due to overworking herself and decides that the remedy is total and complete rest, away from all activities that may perturb her mind.  We also have a husband that does not take his wife’s situation seriously enough to be with her and stimulate her in the ways that married couples do.  Ultimately, the result is that the wife has to find odd things with which to keep her mind busy.  In other words, stimulate her mind. But considering her depression and delicate mental situation, she obsesses with the yellow wallpaper of a room, which eventually drives her completely crazy, right in front of her husband’s keep.

These distancing between husband and wife, in which one of the partners relegates the other’s problem to something not very significant may have deep effects on a relationship as well as o the relegated partner.  According to a study from The American Journal of family therapy, this kind of “Marital conflict has been found to affect couples’ mental health symptoms, such as anxiety and depression”. (Maier, Candice A., and Jacob B. Priest. “Perceived Fairness, Marital Conflict, And Depression: A Dyadic Data Analysis.” American Journal of Family Therapy 44.2 (2016): 95-109. Academic Search Complete. Web. 11 Nov. 2016.). 

 This study also shows that wives are likely to get the symptoms first, and that partners are likely to blame the consequences of marital conflicts on the other person, which explains the way he is acting towards her.

The woman in the story is often looking for ways to escape her husband’s insistence on her total and complete inactivity and she begins to keep a diary that contains information about how she actually feels about her husband and everything in the house with the purpose of keeping busy.  She keeps this diary hidden because she knows he would not understand the way she feels and would blame her for her lack of recovery because of what he would consider overworking her mind. I think this is the main prove that she is unhappy, hiding the way she actually feels from her husband, who is the one that is going to share life with her, is definitely not a sign of happiness or trust and this can also lead to depression. 

According to the story, the woman suffers from nervous depression (Perkins Stetson, II). Nervous depression and a condition called neurasthenia are very related to each other according to the European Archives of Physichiatry & Clinical Neuroscience.  At the time the story was written there was a general belief that women would suffer from depression or neurasthenia due to excessive work attributed to the efforts that women made to accomplish the same goals as men.  “Fifty years ago, such depression was considered to be partly the consequence of the stresses  of modern life…” (Angst, Jules, Vladeta Ajdacic-Gross, and Wulf Rössler. "Two-Week Neurasthenic Major Depression." European Archives Of Psychiatry & Clinical Neuroscience 266.8 (2016): 737-741). Academic Search Complete. Web. 11 Nov. 2016.  So the remedy of complete inactivity that John applied to his wife’s mental illness was not completely wrong according to the beliefs at the time.  However, his detachment to the relationship with his wife together with the lack of stimulation in the brain caused to succumb more deeply into her mental illness.

Neurasthenia is the disease that causes the wife to believe that there are women coming out of the yellow wallpaper in her room. It’s also proven, by the same source, that if the person feels no support from the people surrounding them the disease is going to get worse. 

In an interesting article about occupational therapy, the author states that doctor Herbert James Hall “believed that neurasthenia was not caused by overwork but by faulty living habits that could be corrected through an orders life schedule and selected occupations.”  (Reed, Kathlyn L. "Dr. Hall And The Work Cure." Occupational Therapy In Health Care 19.3 (2005): 33-50. Academic Search Complete. Web. 11 Nov. 2016.)

 The author also mentions in this article that the main treatment at the time was absolute bed rest, which coincides with the type of treatment that John prescribed his wife in the story.

As I mentioned before, life does not only revolve about the relationship people have with their partners, there are also other responsibilities that need attention. The woman in the story is experiencing a mix of an unhealthy relationship with her husband and a lot of chores to do at the household, which are causing her mental issues, but the solution of absolute bed rest, without any stimulation of the brain may cause a mentally depressed person or a person with neurasthenia to completely lose his or her mind, as it happened in the story.  The lack of a healthy relationship with her husband in which he relegated her problems to wanting to do too much, in addition to his proposed remedy that his wife should not do anything for months to get cured, is what caused her to finally lose her mind.
