Mental Illness In Amy Bloom's Silver Water

Mental Illness is a problem that doesn’t always have a solution. A lot of patients who have mental illness’ wait for a cure or treatment that helps their cause. Most of the time there isn’t a cure or treatment that will help and patients have to keep searching until there is one, which may never come. In the story, “Silver Water”, the author Amy Bloom uses Roses’s mental illness to show how treatment doesn’t always work the way people wish it would. Rose goes through a series of events that shows her struggle with her mental illness and how it affects the people around her when she does. The first instance that Amy Bloom shows that Rose has a mental illness is when she is 15 and Rose’s sister, Violet notices that she kept coming home having these weird mood swings that Rose isn’t really known for. Violet mentions in the story that Rose was a popular girl and a very talented singer. After awhile of coming home with these weird moods, Rose eventually stopped coming home and Rose would go to the woods behind her house until their mom came home and hand to get her out of the woods. Amy Bloom writes “After three weeks of this, my mother who is a musician and widely regarded as eccentric, said to my father, who …show more content…
No matter how many treatments and therapists Rose went through I think that in the end the mental illness was going to win inevitably. I think you really start to hope that Rose will win after her first psychotic break, but you start to realize later in the story when Dr. Thorne passes away and when she has her breakdown in the kitchen that she would never really be the same again. Amy Bloom tells an amazing story of how hard it is for someone to overcome a mental illness and how sometimes in the end the mental illness will win no matter how bad you try. Mental illness is a problem that not a lot of people have an experience with but, is still sad for everybody when they hear about