The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The main character in The Yellow Wallpaper, as with the author Charlotte Perkins Gilman, suffered from a disease of depression.  In the story, the woman suffers from postpartum depression and Gilman suffered from a severe and  continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia. Gilman, and the woman in the story, were prescribed the "Rest Cure" which involved them doing absolutely nothing.  The women were not allowed to write, paint, or do anything creative and they were told spend much of their time just lying in bed.  This does not seem like a smart cure to me.  We touched on this subject in class and one of my classmates brought up the fact that if the women were told to lay in a bed all day by themselves, all they would have to keep them company would be their thoughts, which were one of the main causes of their depression.  The "rest cure" to me does exactly the opposite of what it was aiming to accomplish.  It is evident in The Yellow Wallpaper when the main character starts believing that there is a woman trapped behind the wallpaper and at the end of the story she believes that that woman was her and she was not going to be put back into the wallpaper.  The "rest cure" could possibly be the worst thing to prescribe to someone suffering from depression.