Vada's Illness In My Girl

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Homework#3 In My Girl, Vada, the main character, lives with her father in a funeral parlor that he owns. Overtime, living in the funeral parlor, along with other factors, has caused Vada to begin to worry with the idea that she is dying. She comes up with several illness in which she believes she has. As a result, Vada makes several trips to see her doctor claiming to have symptoms of these many illnesses when in fact she might be suffering from illness anxiety disorder. Based on the observations of Vada’s behavior throughout the movie, one can conclude that she shows symptoms of illness anxiety disorder. Vada occupies her time with thoughts that she is contracting illnesses which she thinks she is dying of. She only seems to engage in this behavior when her father begins to work on another corpse. At this time, Vada will go see her doctor complaining that she shows symptoms similar to the symptoms that the person her father is preparing would have displayed. For example, when her father was working on his old high school teacher, Vada complained that she thought she had prostate cancer. She also went to her doctor after her friend Thomas J passed complaining that she could not breath and she was suffocating, a situation similar to …show more content…

One predominant factor is her living conditions. Vada lives with her father and grandmother in a funeral parlor where her dad works. At her age, Vada has yet to fully understand what death is and living in a funeral parlor might have added to her curiosity of it. Her lack of understanding death is shown when she storms into Thomas J's funeral complaining that they prepared his body incorrectly and that he did not look as he did when he was living. Also, early in the movie, she gets kids to pay her money to show them a corpse in its coffin. Instead, she pretends that the corpse moved itself and shows them her living

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