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Mental Illness In Into The Wild

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This book is based on a true story about a man named Chris McCandless. McCandless had many problems and handled them slightly odd. He left his family for a trip that would cost him his life. I believe he had an undiagnosed mental disease that lead him to do this and react to situations the way he did. McCandless may have had the disease schizophrenia he shows signs throughout the book that he may have the disease. When McCandless started calling himself Alexander Supertramp, that rose high suspicion in my eyes. The book “Into the Wild” tries to make McCandless seem as if he is just trying to explore the wild but in reality it was his untreated mental illness that caused him to do it. The name change is a sign he had another personality and that he was suffering from schizophrenia. In an article by Medred he says “Chris was one of those troubled young men who suffer mental illness in their early adult years and flee family and friends for reasons hard to explain”(medred). Many Americans go untreated every year for mental illnesses, according to The National Institution of Mental Health approximately 7.9 million Americans suffer from schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. These are people with the same problems as McCandless. Many more Americans go untreated every year and are believed to be normal …show more content…
Chris would often write his sister and share his feelings and how he was. Carine believes Chris left because of their domestic violence filled childhood their father being abusive and their mother enabling. This was the trigger to Chris’s schizophrenia. Schizophrenia can develop while in the pregnancy stages and in the early stages of childhood, caused by environmental stressors, also in the adolescent stages extremely high environmental disorders can cause development of this

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