The people we share our lives with have a huge impact in everything we do. This impact can be very positive or negative. Some examples of positive impact are support, respect and love. A clear example of a negative one is the one presented in the story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, where the narrator suffers from a mental illness caused by her husband.

The narrator in this story suffers from neurasthenia and nervous depression, according to the story. When it was written there used to be a believe that “such depression was considered to be partly the consequence of the stresses of modern life…” (Angst, Jules, Ajdacic-Gross, Rössler. 737). This is why John, as a physician, recommended complete rest to his wife to treat her illness without knowing that this was only going to make things worse. In another article called “Dr. Hall and The Work Cure”, Kathlyn Reed talks to us about this Doctor’s research on the field. Dr. Hall believed that “neurasthenia was not caused by overwork but by faulty living habits that could be corrected through an ordered life and selected occupations” (Reed, 35). So, her husband should have been giving her chores instead of rest, in order to take care of her illness. 

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 this starts to create a bad relationship between them, as she feels no support coming from him. According to another article “Marital conflict has been found to affect couples mental health symptoms, such as anxiety and depression” (Maier, Candice A., Priest. 95). Again, the husband is provoking what can cause her illness to become worse. He keeps doing the wrong things, as a physician and as a husband. 

In the story, there is a married couple and the wife finds herself depressed.  The husband 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.

This 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 the relegated partner. According to the study from The American Journal of family therapy showed in the article I mentioned above called “Perceived Fairness, Marital Conflict, And Depression: A Dyadic Data Analysis.”; wives are likely to get the symptoms first, and that partners are likely to blame the consequences of marital conflicts on the other person (Maier, Candice A., Priest: 97). This explains the way he is acting towards her, showing no support, and the way she is feeling towards him. A lot of resentment starts to grow in her to the point where she keeps a journal where she talks about the way she actually feels about her husband, all of this being a result of his acts combined with her illness. 

Another reason why she writes on the journal is because it makes her feel better, it gives her a relief feeling because it’s keeping her busy and as Dr. Hall explained in the article I mentioned earlier, keeping her busy is the actual cure for her illness.  The diary is something that is actually helping her both ways, towards her husband and towards her illness. She keeps this diary hidden from John because she thinks he will not support that and will take it from her. This is the main proof that she is unhappy and ill because of him. Hiding something that is helping her, because he will do everything he can to take that away from her.

Nervous depression and her condition called neurasthenia are very related to each other according to the European Archives of Physichiatry & Clinical Neuroscience.  As I mentioned before, 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. 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 combined with the lack of stimulation in the brain caused to succumb more deeply into her mental illness.

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, and it really does get worse. The woman in the story gets to the point where she is so obsessed with the yellow wallpaper in her room that she starts to see women coming out of it.

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 wrong prescription for her illness, which are causing her serious mental issues. At the same time, 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.
