Self-reflection on “Catcher in the Rye: A New era of Mental Illness”

About twenty percent of people are experiencing mental illness in today’s society,  people accept it and know how to handle it seriously have great influences from the 1950s. But public perception and the treatment of mental illness from the 1950s were totally different than now. This was why I chose mental illness from the 1950s as my topic and the novel as my primary sources. The 1950s was a significant era for mental illness because everything was changed during this decade. My essay described the changed on public perception and treatment of mental illness. The novel Catcher in the Rye was written in the 1950s, the main character Holden, who had a borderline personality disorder and bipolar disorder was typically representative of the mental patient during that time and he could be seen as a reflection of American perception. In order to understand the mental illness, we need to know the origin of mental illness. Sigmund Freud was the founding father of psychoanalytic theory and he had great influences on the development of mental illness. His theory explained patients’ irrational behaviors. Since his theory introduced to society, the public perception and the treatment of mental illness were improved. As result, patients lived in the 1950s knew how to get the treat and the society was turned to accept it instead considered the patients as a madman or thought their irrational behaviors caused by the witchcraft. For example, because of the treatment developed, Holden knew to get the treat from the hospital instead to ask priests for an exorcism as patients did at the earlier decade.

In this paper, I focused to discuss the decade of the 1950s because the treatment, public perception, and the historical background were special than other decades. It was a new era of mental illness which could be considered an origin of mental illness. The mental illness was a serious issue, people’s life and perception would directory impact the society. The purpose of this essay was to try to inform people how did things get changed during the 1950s and how does the development influence the progress of mental illness. It mixed up the former perception and the open mind of mental illness. Throughout this paper, I want everyone understand the importance of public perception of mental illness because it would directory influences patient’s whole life. For example, lack of knowledge would cause a patient suicide. If the public had deeply understood on mental illness, those patients would not postpone treatment. I used Holden as a main source on the paper because his perception of mental illness was changed like he considered himself as a madman during when he was 17 years old but knew to get treatment from the hospital during his adult age. Throughout this paper, I knew that sixty percent of mental illness patients from the 1950s did not know how to get treatment because public shamed on it. Moreover, I learned that the government started to pay attention and gave foundation to develop and improve the treatment of mental illness since the 1950s. Because of the development of mental illness, the public perception was changed and thus we have high-quality treatment today. If you want a healthy body, you need to know how does the mental illness get developed. Because the former treatment and the impact would tell you how lucky you are living in a modern society!

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