In The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman grasped the historical and cultural aspects of how life was like for women and mentally ill patients during the late 19th century. She brought attention to how patients were treated, especially women, during this time period as well as bringing attention to how women behaved. In the article, "Creating nursing care for the mentally ill: Mental health nursing in Dutch asylums," Boschma summarized a study on the asylums and the care given in them. Since mental health was still fairly new and the care wasn't proven to work successfully, people in this time did not really know how to understand mental instability and how to properly treat it. This was shown specifically through Jane's husband, John, and his ignorance toward her situation until the very end of the story. The other study was a brief excerpt from The American Naturalist titled, "Psychology." This excerpt focused on the similarities of women and their conditions finding that women were more likely to copy other women. This is due to women craving attention that they may not receive from their husbands at home, in the case of Jane and John, so they do strange things in order to receive that attention that they are lacking. Jane was a typical woman who was dealing with mental health issues that her husband chose to ignore and forget, however his denial eventually ended up damaging the both of them in the end. Gilman shed light on her situation in the story by incorporating the rejection of Jane’s illness by her husband. John’s denial rooted from his ignorance to the severity of her illness. His ignorance stemmed from the uneducated professionals who trained him during this time period since mental health was fairly new. He thought that she was faking and pretending like other women who have experienced postpartum depression, but she was really suffering.

Jane, who is the main character of the story, is dealing with what we know now as postpartum depression. Her husband, John, is her caregiver in the story and he restricts her behavior and does not allow her to see her child she has just given birth to. According the study in The American Naturalist, women are more reluctant to repeat other women's actions and responses rather than men would be. This study could be the reason that John was so rejecting of her condition because other women have repeated cases and because of the conclusion of this study that more women are more likely to repeat each other. John felt that she was lost in her own imagination and not suffering from an actual depressed state of mind. Rejection of mental illness is really common in society until something extremely dramatic happens to where you instantly have to believe that it is real. This is the case with Jane and John. He denied her situation for so long and finally came to his senses when he saw her in the act of having a psychotic episode. John reinforces his denial over his wife's condition by constantly calling her pet names and treating her as a child. He only comes to see her to feed her, sleep with her, or see if she is okay. When she tells him about her problems and that she is not feeling any better he simply ignores her remarks and tells her that everything is going to be okay and that she actually is doing a lot better. Jane, however, also could have been exaggerating her situation as well. She was doing some very outlandish things while she was being hospitalized and did not even realize that it was she who was actually doing them. She referred to her other self as the woman in the wallpaper. She was telling of all these strange things that woman did when in reality it was her that was doing them. She was initially trapped in her own self just like the woman was trapped in the wallpaper. She could not get out of her own thoughts in her mind.

Her situation can be attributed to the fact that she wanted attention from John that she was not getting from outside of the home because he is a doctor. Her faking psychotic episodes would get her into the hospital and near John where she wanted to be. She craved his attention which is shown by how excited she gets whenever he came to the room to visit her and see how she was doing. He made it clear to not get too wrapped up into the husband loving mode of a typical couple but to keep their relationship in the hospital at a more professional stand. This mocking of mental health can be due to the "Psychology" excerpt's study of how women tend to copy each other. She saw how close her husband was to his patients and that he has to see them all the time to make sure they are doing well, and she wanted that so she drove herself to insanity in order to receive that attention she craved. 

Jane's treatment shows the medical and cultural aspect of mental illness in the late 19th century. In Boschma's study, they concluded that the combination of explanations for mental illness, somatic care and therapy were weak foundations and matches for the reality of asylum care of patients. This means that psychiatrists had a completely different feat ahead of them when actually dealing with patients one on one. They were not prepared for the actual reality of mental health patients and their actual mental states. Since they were not able to directly work with the problems that the mental health patients were dealing with, it resulted in failed therapeutic care within the asylums at the hospitals. The nurses mainly gave care to patients as if they were their guardians. They made sure they ate, were bathed and clothed, and just provided them with their basic needs of care. The medical professionals are a direct comparison of how John treated Jane. He is there to make sure she sleeps and eats well, but he does not deal with her actual state of mind at a more psychological level in order to figure out what is really going on with her. He ignores her remarks about how she isn't feeling well and how there is a lady that she keeps seeing. He thinks that he is helping her by restricting what she can and cannot do but he is really harming her in the process. The harm done to the both of them is shown at the end of the story when John passes out from seeing her psychotic episode and when Jane sees the woman finally "get out" of the wallpaper. We see that the lady in the wallpaper was her all along, that Jane really was psychotic, and that she was just wrapped in her thoughts as they were tearing her apart from within her. We also see that John can finally take her wife for the woman she is and initiate the treatment needed to make her well again. 
