Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
How mental health affects life essay
How mental health affects life essay
How mental health affects life essay
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: How mental health affects life essay
Ms.Krauss Alex Penfold 4/30/14 Holden Essay Many people today suffer from a very serious mental disorder known as PTSD or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. In the novel The Catcher in The Rye, Holden Caulfield, or Holden as we call him, suffers from the mental disorder PTSD. Even though many people say he is a “normal” teenager going through regular teenage emotions, there is an ample amount of evidence to prove that he does in fact suffer from a mental disorder. In order to be diagnosed with PTSD, a person must have three different types of symptoms: relieving symptoms, avoidance symptoms, and arousal symptoms. In the novel The Catcher in The Rye the main character holden suffers from PTSD. One condition …show more content…
According to http://www.pchtreatment.com “Persons with PTSD can have feelings of detachment from family and friends, isolation, and loss of social interactions” This social problem is due to the feeling of security he achieves when he is emotionally detached from others. Holden has a lack of good relationships because he always distances himself from others through his comments and lies, and this is a sign of mental instability. Even in a school filled with people, Holden refuses to make friends and experiences a total lack of interest in his school work. This can be seen in his everyday comments of roommate Stradlater and Ackley. Holden feels that schoolwork is unnecessary and usually does not even make an effort to keep from failing. For example, in his P.S. letter to Mr. Spencer, his history teacher, he writes "It is alright with me if you flunk me though as I am flunking everything else except English anyway.” With this quote we can see that Holden has no interest in school and doesn’t even care if he is flunking his classes. Although Holden himself does not mention it, he believes he has no future. Due to him failing all his classes and getting kicked out of school, we can see that Holden doesn’t want a future and doesn’t want to form friendships in school, therefore he detaches himself from school and …show more content…
In the novel The Catcher in The Rye, Holden Caulfield, or Holden as we call him, suffers from the mental disorder PTSD. Even though many people say he is a “normal” teenager going through regular teenage emotions, there is an ample amount of evidence to prove that he does in fact suffer from a mental disorder. In order to be diagnosed with PTSD, a person must have three different types of symptoms: relieving symptoms, avoidance symptoms, and arousal symptoms. In the novel The Catcher in The Rye the main character holden suffers from PTSD. One condition that comes with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is always wanting to relive the past and holding onto past memories. According to: http://www.ptsd.ne.gov, “Re-experiencing symptoms are symptoms that involve reliving the traumatic event. There are a number of ways in which people may re-live a trauma. Allie was Holden’s younger brother who died of leukemia on July 18, 1946, when he was eleven and Holden was thirteen. For Holden, the death of his eleven year old brother was a very tragic and emotional experience for him to go threw. Having PTSD, Holden uses Allie as a mean of support, or a comforting thought. “ Every time I'd get to the end of a block I'd make believe I was talking to my brother Allie. I'd say to him, "Allie, don't let me disappear. Allie, don't let me disappear. Please, Allie. And then when I'd reach
In the novel, Allie has an immense impact on Holden through his journey. Allie is Holden’s brother that died of Cancer when Holden was young. Holden is always sad about Allie’s death and is always thinking about Allie. Allie’s impact on Holden’s life sparks from Holden feeling like Allie missed out on opportunities.Allie also brings Holden a sense of guilt and also pain because he feels that Allie is missing out and that it is unfair for him to experience life. Holden can never get over Allies death and Allie because of his guilt that stems from his beliefs of Allie’s inability to experience life. When talking to Phoebe he says, “I Know he’s dead? Dont you think I know that? I can still like him, though, can't I? Just because somebody's dead, you don't just stop liking them, for God’s sake-especially if they were about a thousand times nicer than the people you know that’re alive and all” (Salinger 171). This quote shows Holden’s reluctance to not forget Allie, and move on with his life not living in regret of Allie’s...
In J.D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in The Rye Salinger writes about the main character Holden Caulfield and his life. Holden is a teenager who comes from a wealthy family, he loves his family and lives very happy until the death of his brother Allie. After his brother died Holden becomes troubled, being kicked out of school again and again developing a negative view of the world. Holden throughout the book shows anger,denial, and acceptance over the loss of his brother.
As Eugene McNamara stated in his essay “Holden Caulfield as Novelist”, Holden, of J.D. Salinger’s novel Catcher in the Rye, had met with long strand of betrayals since he left Pencey Prep. These disappointments led him through the adult world with increasing feelings of depression and self-doubt, leading, finally to his mental breakdown.
There is one universal truth that will exist through out all of time and space that affects all that live to experience it. That truth is known as grief. We all experience grief, and for Holden Caulfield, grief is a major aspect of his life, the force that drives him to do everything he does in the novel, The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. There are seven stages to this emotion known as grief: denial, depression, anger, bargaining, guilt, reconstruction, and finally, acceptance. There are many parts in the novel that could have influenced Holden’s grief, but the main one that most people who read the novel have figured it out was the death of his little brother Allie. The root to Holden’s grief lies with his brother which cause Holden’s to act and change the way he does in the novel.
Allie was Holden’s best friend, and when he passed away it leaves Holden in an unfamiliar state because they were so clo...
Allie, Holden's young brother who died several years earlier, was a major symbol throughout the story. When Holden remembers incidents from his past involving Allie, his attitude changes, such as when he writes the composition about Allie's baseball glove or when Holden broke his hand after punching all of the windows after Allie died. "I slept in the garage the night he died, and I broke all the goddam windows with my fist, just for the hell of it". (39) He feels that Allie was one of the few people who were not phony in a world full of phonies. More importantly, Allie represents the innocence and childhood that Holden strives to find throughout his three-day journey. In Holden's opinion, Allie represents the purity that Holden looks for in the world. Holden admits that he admires Allie more than he admires Jesus, and even prays to Allie at one point, rather than Jesus. Allie is Holden's role model, whom he judges the rest of the world according to. When Allie dies, it creates turbulence in Holden's life.
However, his feelings suggest that the true reason for his depression is his loss of innocence. When he was 13 years old, he lost his little brother Allie to leukemia. Allie meant a lot to Holden. He even became a symbol in the book. Allie is the one who keeps Holden from falling off the cliff, he’s the reason that he hasn’t lost his innocence yet.
In the novel, The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger, a sixteen year old boy named Holden Caulfield gets expelled from his school and runs away before his parents find out. He goes to his home town, New York, and encounters many people. Throughout the novel, Caulfield is still coping with the death of his brother Allie. His attitude slowly decreases and various signs of a mental disorder are exhibited through his actions and his thoughts. Some people believe that he does not have a mental disorder, he is just grieving; however, he has clear symptoms that he is suffering from depression and anti-social disorder. These disorders are shown when Caulfield takes everything in a negative way, talks about being depressed, thinks that everyone is “phony”, and talks about his deceased brother.
The origins of Holden’s disillusionment and the reason that it all started is the death of his younger brother which he was very fond of and admired, Allie, three years ago. The death of Allie is very significant in Holden’s mind since it is an event which he remembers quite clearly at multiple occasions during the book. For example, when Holden is writing a descriptive composition for his roommate Stradlater, he decides to write about Allie’s baseball mitt since it is the only thing on his mind. “My brother Allie had this left-handed fielder’s mitt. He was
In the novel, Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger, Holden Caulfield is an example of a prosaic rich adolescent boy,with a pedestrian set of problems, but a psychoanalysis reveals that Holden has a plethora of atypical internal conflicts. Internal conflicts that other students at Pencey, such as Stradlater and Ackley, would not normally experience.
Holden experiences agitation and irritability towards dealing with people he perceives at phonies. HIs agitation comes with the experiences he has had with people such as Ackley, Stradlater, his parents, and others he can interpret as fake or that have done things in the past to irritate him. His irritation among people is very common and repetitive throughout the book where it could be identified as a symptom of PTSD. For example, a scene Holden demonstrates agitation is when he talks to Phoebe about what his parents might do to him since he had gotten kicked out of yet another school; Pencey. “No, he won’t. The worst he’ll do, he’ll give me hell again, and then he’ll send me to military school.” (Salinger 166). Holden’s agitation comes from
In the beginning of the book the reader immediately starts to see these symptoms. Before Holden left Pencey he said “ what I was really hanging around for, I was trying… to feel some kind of good-bye. I mean I’ve left schools and places I didn’t even know I was leaving them. I hate that”(Salinger 7). One of the symptoms of PTSD is living in fear everyday and this is how Holden felt. In the quote he says that he hates not feeling some kind of good-bye but what he is really trying to say is that he fears he will not feel it. Holden is trying to change his fear into other feelings, like hate. Another symptom of PTSD that Holden experiences is depression. Many times during the novel Holden says “It makes me so depressed I go crazy”(19). During the story Holden often talks about things that make him depressed and this quote is just one of the multiple examples of the suffering he goes through because of his depression.Throughout Holden's journey there are so many questions constantly going through his mind. A couple of these questions were should he make phone calls to his old friends and if he should go home to his family. “Boy did I feel rotten. I felt so damn lonesome”(62-63). He has an opportunity to cure his loneliness by calling his old friends but he never follows through. “Then I went over and laid down on Ely’s bed…. Boy did I feel rotten. I felt so damn lonesome”(62-63). This quote shows that even when Holden isn’t alone he still suffers from overwhelming loneliness, which is also a symptom of PTSD. In the novel Holden experienced many of the symptoms of PTSD and this story accurately showed the difficulties that PTSD sufferers experience when trying to live their daily
In the book, “The Catcher in The Rye” by J.D. Salinger, the main character is very strange in numerous ways. His name is Holden Caulfield and boy has he got something wrong with him. He rambles on and on about nonsense for the first 20-something chapters of the book. He only likes 3-4 people in the book. He smokes and drinks heavily at the ripe age of seventeen. He has been expelled out of numerous prep schools, and feels abandoned and not wanted. He has some sort of mental illness and I think I know what it is. I believe that Holden Caulfield has a mental illness known as Borderline Personality Disorder, also known as BPD. The reasoning for my thinking is that Holden’s actions match up with the symptoms of this illness and the isolation he
Manic-Depressive Behavior Exhibited in The Catcher in the Rye. The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger, portrays Holden Cawfield, a New York City teenager in the 1950's, as a manic-depressive. Holden's depression starts with the death of his brother, Allie. Holden is expelled from numerous schools due to his poor academics, which are brought on by his depression. Manic depression, compulsive lying, and immaturity throughout the novel characterize Holden.
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, about one in four American adults suffer from a mental disorder. This means that 57.7 out of 217.8 million people over the age of 18 are ill; never mind that mental illnesses are the leading cause of disability in Canada and the United States. Holden Caulfield, the controversial main character of J.D Salinger’s novel Catcher in the Rye, spends much of the book wandering through the streets of New York City. Kicked out of boarding school for the umpteenth time, he does many odd things: he calls a prostitute, tries to befriend a taxi driver, drinks with middle aged women, and sneaks into his own house in the middle of the night. While many of these things seem outré, some may even go as far as to say that he is mentally disturbed. From a psychiatric standpoint, main character Holden Caulfield exhibits the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder (manic depression), and psychosis throughout the infamous novel Catcher in the Rye.