why you should read the bell jar

// trigger warning: depression, anxiety, suicide //

Chances are, you or someone you know currently suffers from or has suffered from a mental illness. Actually, around 20% of U.S. adults have been diagnosed with some type of mental illness.¹ Personally, I have experienced anxiety and depression, but I'm on medication now. I have been stable for the past two years, but for the longest time, I thought I would never escape. I thought my life was destined to be a rollercoaster of emotions, one month happy and the next one hell. I remember what it was like to be so anxious that I couldn't eat, couldn't sleep, couldn't maintain a regular pulse. And I remember what it was like to be so depressed that I couldn't get out of bed, couldn't reach out to those I loved most, couldn't even see a future in which I'd be happy. It got so bad that I began to have passively suicidal thoughts. I didn't get help until it was literally a life-or-death situation.

I'm not sharing this to make anyone upset. I'm sharing this because I know I'm not the only one who has suffered in this way. I allowed my mental illnesses to wreak havoc over my life for years before I finally accepted the help I needed and got things under control. But I know that there are other people who are not as lucky as I was. Medication can be expensive and fickle. Counseling doesn't always work. People aren't always supportive. It's really, really hard to escape mental illness. But I'm one of the fortunate people who has.

Sylvia Plath, on the other hand, did not. Plath was an American author who taught English at Smith College, a private women's college in Massachusetts.² She struggled with mental illness and entered a mental institution, but she managed to get it under control. Plath began to write again and composed The Bell Jar as a semi-autobiographical take on her experiences (albeit biased from her clouded state of mind). Ten years later, while composing poems for her Ariel collection, Plath began to exhibit signs of mental illness again. However, no one suspected how serious it was. In February 1963, Plath took her own life in her home in London.

Mental illness--specifically, depression--can be deadly. It is the 10th most common cause of death in the United States.⁴ But we so rarely talk about it. Yes, it's gotten better in recent years. My college, specifically, does a good job of trying to destigmatize mental illness and provide an open space for people to talk about their experiences. Still, most people that I know who suffer from mental illness(es) are not very open about it. Granted, it is a personal matter, but there is a huge disparity between people's openness to talk about, say, their injured hamstring (#guilty) and their bipolar disorder.

Enter The Bell Jar. This is one of the most honest books I have ever read. I very much enjoyed its stream-of-consciousness style. Esther Greenwood, who is loosely based on Plath, is straightforward (not to mention, funny) in her narration. She critiques the world she sees, sparing no one--not her mother, not her best friends, not even herself. And I believe that this unrelenting pessimism is one of the signs of Esther's major depression. She sees everything that happens in life as meaningless and eventually preoccupies herself with finding her way out of it.

"To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream" (193).

I know this feeling. That ecclesiastical, numb sensation that no matter what you do, it's all going to end in death. So why not sooner rather than later? Esther goes from being a happy, hard-working student (incidentally, an English Major) to a bored student on summer holiday who can't even read a book because her brain won't turn off. Esther can't sleep and she stops taking care of herself because all she can think about it is the pain of existence. She eventually tries to kill herself, but the attempt fails, and she ends up in a mental hospital. The book ends on an ambiguous note, perhaps because Plath did not yet know how her own story would end. But I am hopeful that Esther survived her mental illness, even though Plath did not.

Plath does an excellent job of portraying the tortuous life that the majorly depressed endure. The Bell Jar takes a good, hard look into the reality of mental illness, not the romanticized version (you know, that cute tumblr photo of a girl staring moodily out of a window). It's as if Plath was saying, "Wake up, people!" Mental illness can affect anyone. Through The Bell Jar, Plath communicates her personal experience with mental illness and raises awareness about the problem. Today, over 50 years after Plath's death, people still have a hard time recognizing and dealing with mental illness. Thanks to books like this, we can at least shed a bit more light on a taboo subject instead of ignoring it. Because some people can't ignore it--they're living it.