The treatments include both medication and psychotherapy, where patients are encouraged to find hope and happiness. Holden Caulfield seems to show the opposite in many of the symptoms, but his thoughts and actions clearly demonstrates symptoms of depression.
Some of the more apparent symptoms Holden shows are use of alcohol, poor school performance, insomnia, and suicidal thoughts. First of all, he drinks alcohol several times through the course of the story by lying about his age. For example, he tells us that at the Lavender Room in the hotel, “I ordered a Scotch and …show more content…
It’s obvious that the only people Holden likes and cares about are his younger siblings. Holden tells Phoebe, “‘I like Allie… And I like doing what I’m doing right now. Sitting here with you, and talking, and thinking about stuff..’”(pg. 171) One reason Holden is so affectionate towards his younger siblings is because of guilt for his brother, as shown in “It wasn’t that I didn’t use to take him with me when I went somewhere. I did. But that one day, I didn’t. He didn’t get sore about it- he never got sore about anything- but I keep thinking about it anyway, when I get very depressed.” (pg. 99) Naturally, he doesn’t want them to feel the depression that he’s feeling. “Somebody’d written ‘Fuck You’ on the wall. It drove me near crazy… they’d all think about it and maybe even worry about it for a couple of days. I kept wanting to kill whoever’d written it.” (pg. 201) explains that Holden doesn’t want the little kids to lose their innocence and become insecure like him. This is also expressed when Holden talks about being the “catcher in the rye”. He wants to catch little kids from falling off a “cliff’, which translates to wanting to stop the children from going downhill with their lives. It can be said that these two are the causes of Holden’s depression because first, the fact that Holden cares about Allie and Phoebe so much because he really cared about Allie and