Rose Mary Walls
Rose Mary Walls is mentally ill. I am not a doctor; therefore, I cannot medically diagnose her but I strongly feel she has a bipolar disorder and depression. Her overly emotional tendencies, narcissism, and also lack of maturity are all signs that point to Rose Mary having a mental disorder.
Rose Mary is either over-emotional or emotionless. This is a sign of bipolar disorder. She has intense shifts in her mood and day to day behaviors. “She’d be happy for days on end, announcing that she decided to think only positive thoughts. But the positive thoughts would give way to negative thoughts. When that happened, Mom would refused to get out of bed. She would lay wrapped up in the blankets on the sofa bed, sobbing about how
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much she hated her life” (207). Sleeping a lot and not getting out of bed is a sign of depression. The intense mood shifts are a sign of the bipolar disorder. Earlier, when the family is living in the desert, one of their cats has kittens. Since they could not keep them, Rex would put them in a burlap sack and throw them into a pond. When Jeannette stated how unfair it was, Mom says ,“We gave them a little extra time on the planet. They should be grateful for that” (37). Aside from the fact that she shows no remorse when the kittens are being killed, her own daughter dies and she is not phased. This is not a normal reaction to the loss of a loved one. “Mom never seemed upset about Mary Charlene’s death. ‘God knows what He’s doing,’ she said” (28). Rose Mary doesn’t blame Rex or herself for Mary Charlene's death. She basically states that it was God’s choice to take her back. While Rex is overcome with deep sadness and begins drinking more, Rose Mary goes on with her life as nothing tragic has happened. No grieving, no crying, nothing. Rose Mary has the same reaction when her own mother dies. The strangest part of this all, is the death of her blood-related family does not phase her, but when her mother-in-law dies, something changes. She is upset. She prays to God for her soul and even kisses her corpse at the funeral. This just goes to show how twisted her emotions really are. Rose Mary is narcissistic. When Jeanette and Bryan find a real diamond ring in a dumpster, what does she do with it? She uses the ring to improve others view of herself and her own self esteem. She wears the ring, instead of selling it to provide for her children. Rose Mary also spends almost all of her time painting. When the family “skedaddles” she must take all of her paintings and supplies along with, which depletes the room left in the car for the children belongings. She picks her hobby over her children in more than one instances. She questions “‘Why can’t I do what I want to do?” (74) when the children tell her she needs to get a job. She feels her paintings are more important than getting a teaching job to support the family. Rose Mary also refuses to leave her alcoholic husband because she is afraid to see how others will view her. Most of all, Rose Mary lacks the maturity it takes to care for four children.
Jeannette Walls states in an interview “My mother could not take care of herself, how could I possibly expect her to take care of me?” (Diversity Conversation) She never takes responsibility or has the initiative to go out and make a better life for her and her children. Rose Mary uses guilt and verbal abuse to keep the children “in line,” so to speak. Rex even resorts to physical abuse after Rose Mary snitches on Jeannette. “‘How dare you?’ she shouted. ‘You’re in trouble now — big trouble. I’m telling your dad. Just you wait until he comes home’” (219). As neglected as they are, they somehow survive the crazy conditions they are forced to live with — lack of food, water, a stable shelter, lack of personal hygiene, and even lack of parental supervision. Lori, Jeannette, Brian and Maureen resort to the worst possible ways to keep themselves alive. For example, the three older children find a stick of margarine in the refrigerator and split the stick between each other because they are so hungry. When Rose Mary finds out ,she becomes very angry — stating that the margarine was for her. Another time, the kids want to eat ham, but find it infested with maggots, Rose Mary tells them to just cut off the parts with maggots and eat the rest. That it will be “fine.” “A big green Dumpster stood in the parking lot. When no one was looking, Brian and I pushed open the lid, climbed up, and dived inside to search for bottles. I was afraid it might be full of yucky garbage. Instead, we found an astonishing treasure: cardboard boxes filled with loose chocolates. Some of them were whitish and dried-out-looking, and some were covered with a mysterious green mold, but most of them were fine. We pigged out on chocolates,” (110). This just shows how desperate they were for food. At the same time, their mother is hiding food from them, eating it on the sly. “‘I can’t help it,’ she sobbed. ‘I’m a sugar
addict, just like your father is an alcoholic’” (174). Rose Mary lets weeks pass with the children not being bathed. Plus, their clothes are only washed weekly, if they’re lucky. No mother, in her sane mind, would allow her children to be starving and dirty when she has the ability to change that. As stated earlier, the kids find a diamond ring that she refuses to sell to help her provide for her children — to improve her self-esteem. All in all, there is definitely something wrong with Rose Mary Walls.While she did provide her children with great educations, it’s plain to see with her emotional ticks, her narcissism, and her immaturity that something is not right. She has almost no ability to take care of herself, let alone her children, or anyone else for that matter.
Neglect is the failure or refusal of a parent or care giver to provide the basic needs: food, safety, hygiene, and clothing. With famished children, Jeannette’s mother remarks: “Why spend the afternoon making a meal that will be gone in an hour…when in the same amount of time, I can do a painting that will last forever” (56). What we perceive here, the characteristic conduct of Mrs. Walls, is an unwillingness to set aside her own interests in order to care for others (specifically, her own children). Rudely, her mother along with many other deteriorated parents are pre-occupied ...
As she got older, Jeannette and her siblings made their own life, even as their parents became homeless. Jeannette and her older sister Lori decide to run away from their family in Virginia and go start a new life in New York City. However, after a few months, the rest of the family moves to New York and settles down. While in the City, Jeannette gets a job as a reporter, which was her life goal, and one day on her way to an event she sees her mother rummaging around in a dumpster. While the rest of the family gets along, Maureen, the youngest of the family goes insane and stabs their
During the childhood of Jeannette Walls her and her siblings all had to be self reliant to get everyday necessities. Jeannette and her siblings have to do many things such as scavenging for food in any place they could think of. Jeannette would “slip back into the classroom [during recess] and find something in some other kids lunch bag that wouldn’t be missed”(68). Or if she was at a friends house she would ask to use the bathroom and if no one was in the kitchen she would “grab
Shameless is a U.S TV show that has quickly gathered a cult-like following. The show focuses on a family, the Gallagher’s, and their fight to survive in the Southside of Chicago. The father is an alcoholic and relies on schemes to make money, forcing the children to learn to fend for themselves and rely on their friends in the neighborhood. One of these friends is a middle aged woman named Sheila Jackson, and it is very clear from the first time her character is introduced that she is definitely abnormal and has trouble functioning. Sheila suffers from Agoraphobia, fear and avoidance of situations which causes a person to feel unsafe. (Durand & Barlow, 2016) In Sheila’s case, her agoraphobia causes her to be unable to leave her home. This causes
At first glance, the reader could not imagine a more incompatible and diverse pair than Blanche DuBois and Fernie Mae Rosen, two women from very contrasting backgrounds and racial standings. However, these two women share similar passions and mental disorders, showing both their vulnerability to the world and mutual personal energies. Both weave an alternate reality inside their psyches that deceive them into believing that life is not worthwhile, and yet both appear to live life to various sexual and emotional extremes. Such compatibility shows the correlation in their mutual lifestyles despite incongruous backgrounds. Men always seem to be at the root of their problems, despite their clear and discernible negative reactions to the opposite sex. The examples of a virginal aura that eclipses their sexual promiscuity, their mutual hatred for the world and the people that surround them, and their transformation from passion into real madness show the reader that they have more in common than one would think.
While Jeannette’s father acknowledges that he is harming his family and tries to better himself, her mother never once tries to improve. She ignores all of her and her family’s problems, often times contributing more to the problem to benefit herself, worsening the situation for her children. The mother copes in selfish ways, disregarding her family in order to make her life more enjoyable. A perfect example is when the family is sitting in the living room without any food, trying to keep their minds off of hunger, when Brian, Jeannette’s brother, sees that the mother is discretely eating a chocolate bar. The mother tries to defend herself, saying that she’s a “sugar addict, just like [their] father is an alcoholic.” (Walls 174) The mother has never showed any signs of an addiction to sugar, and she’s clearly trying to get the kids sympathy for being selfish. She has behavior that is completely destructive for her family, and she needs to learn and practice better coping
...nd recover from sorrow and grief. Throughout the memoir, there have been lots of ups and downs in Jeannette’s family thanks to Rose Mary’s bipolar disorder. At first, I often blamed Rose Mary for bringing an unpleasant childhood to those four Walls children since Rex Walls does not behave appropriately due to his alcohol abuse, but Rose Mary is actually a victim and patient of bipolar disorder, whose conditions have not only been largely ignored in the memoir, but also greatly influenced her ways of thinking and behaving.
Diana Miller, 25 was diagnosed with major depressive disorder and borderline personality disorder after being rushed to the hospital following another suicide attempt . Her symptoms and background are outlined in her vignette and will be examined in detail throughout the paper. The purpose of this essay will be to explore the possible additional diagnoses for Diana’s behaviour as well as look deeper into the feasible explanations of how and why her behaviour turned abnormal. Therefore through analyzing the diagnostic features, influence of culture, gender, and environment, in addition to outlining paradigm explanations and possible treatment methods, one can better understand Diana Miller’s diagnoses.
Some symptoms of bipolar would be inflated self-esteem, inability to sit still or sleep restfully, pressure to keep talking or switch topics, racing thoughts, and difficulty concentrating. Bipolar can be caused by genetics and one’s environment. Some examples in the movie “Mommie Dearest” Joan Crawford showed was the scene where Joan and her current boyfriend were walking on the beach and she was talking about wanting kids and was perfectly fine for the most part until she started talking about she wanted her kids to have a father unlike her and she suddenly became mad and began ranting about how her father was never around. Another way Joan Crawford displayed bipolar disorder was when she just received the news over the phone that she received a part that she auditioned for until she went to tell her daughter Christine and saw her pretending to receive an award and she became outraged and cut Christine’s
“When Dad went crazy, we all had our own ways of shutting down and closing off…” (Walls 115).In Jeannette Walls memoir, The Glass Castle, Walls enlightens the reader on what it’s like to grow up with a parent who is dependent on alcohol, Rex Walls, Jeannette’s father, was an alcoholic. Psychologically, having a parent who abuses alcohol is the worst thing for a child. The psychological state of these children can get of poorer quality as they grow up. Leaving the child with psychiatric disorders in the future and or being an alcoholic as well.
The psychiatrist recommended that she be admitted to a mental hospital for women, where she can rest and recover. Another sign of the Borderline Personality Disorder is c...
I have chosen to write about Virginia Woolf, a British novelist who wrote A Room of One’s Own, To the Lighthouse and Orlando, to name a few of her pieces of work. Virginia Woolf was my first introduction to feminist type books. I chose Woolf because she is a fantastic writer and one of my favorites as well. Her unique style of writing, which came to be known as stream-of-consciousness, was influenced by the symptoms she experienced through her bipolar disorder. Many people have heard the word "bipolar," but do not realize its full implications. People who know someone with this disorder might understand their irregular behavior as a character flaw, not realizing that people with bipolar mental illness do not have control over their moods. Virginia Woolf’s illness was not understood in her lifetime. She committed suicide in 1941.
“The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a story that surrounds many different topics. The narrator is living in a time period where women were looked down upon and mental illnesses were misunderstood. The narrator of the story suffers from post-partum depression and is recording her journey in a journal. Her husband, the typical man at the time, put her on “the rest cure,” as he believed that mental illnesses should be treated like physical illnesses. He brings her to a house far away from other people and makes her stay in the nursery. The nursery had shabby yellow wallpaper which sickened her, but intrigued her at the same time. The rest cure was basically confinement, both physically and mentally. She was deprived of any form of creativity, this included writing, which was one of the things that kept her sane. This “cure” eventually leads to the decrease of her mental stability as she becomes more and more obsessed with the wallpaper. In order to convey a story with so many themes lots of literary devices were used. In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses symbolism and characterization to explore themes about the lack of understanding of women and their mental health.
From the beginning, details in the story suggested that she was an artistic, creative person. She makes comments about the yellow wallpaper in her recounts, bringing attention to the “…sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin” and the “…bloated curves and flourishes- a kind of “debased Romanesque” with delirium tremens”; something that would only be noticed by someone acquainted with art (Gilman 238 & 241). Also, her husband John makes reference to her “…imaginative power and habit of story-making”, further suggesting her creative intuition (239). With this in mind, a new outlook on her degrading mental state can be reached in regards to her inability to express herself due to the resting cure. The main character frequently references her desire to do any amount of
History shows that signs of mental illness and abnormal behavior have been documented as far back as the early Greeks however, it was not viewed the same as it is today. The mentally ill were previously referred to as mad, insane, lunatics, or maniacs. W.B. Maher and B.A. Maher (1985) note how many of the terms use had roots in old English words that meant emotionally deranged, hurt, unhealthy, or diseased. Although early explanations were not accurate, the characteristics of the mentally ill have remained the same and these characteristics are used to diagnose disorders to date. Cultural norms have always been used to assess and define abnormal behavior. Currently, we have a decent understanding of the correlates and influences of mental illness. Although we do not have complete knowledge, psychopathologists have better resources, technology, and overall research skills than those in ancient times.