Psychosis In Dr. Elton's Short Story 'The Yellow Pill'

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Psychosis is a strange phenomenon as most who have it don’t realize they do. Often, psychosis can be cured with therapy, but sometimes, it requires medication. Rog Phillips, in his story “The Yellow Pill”, addresses both these methods of curing delusions in an individual with psychosis. Still, the reality is that one man needs therapy as the true setting is on Earth. Throughout the short story “The Yellow Pill”, the main character Dr. Elton makes note of things that prove that the story is taking place on Earth. The main character, Dr. Elton, a renowned psychiatrist, takes on his new client Gerald Bocek: a murderer. Bocek doesn’t believe he has killed six people in a supermarket, instead, he believes he “blasted five Venusian lizard pirates …show more content…

But, when he had his first experience with the pill he explained, “I found I couldn’t work without my professionally built symbol inserts about people that enabled me to see them–not as they are–but as a complex of normal and abnormal symptoms,” compared to when he took it the second time and had been in agonizing pain yelling, “I feel like I’m dying! I didn’t feel like this the other time I took one” proving that he noticed a difference in the feeling of the pill. The flaw in this theory is that it has been proven that the effects of a drug on a person's body can change every time they take it. According to the Washington Post “And new side effects can turn up even in medications you’ve been taking for a long time, says Gary LeRoy, a family physician at East Dayton Health Center in Ohio. ‘Drug effects and their side effects can change over time,’ he says. A tolerance or intolerance can develop. Side effects can crop up well into a course of treatment.” Dr. Elton’s inconsistent experience with the yellow pill shows to the reader that he is suffering from a common side effect that drug users frequently experience in the real

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