Each
year that passes by, more and more people are diagnosed with a variety of
mental illnesses, ranging from moderate to severe. Although there are many specific
reasons as to why people develop psychological diseases, it all cultivates to
form one common reason: life. Whatever the specific reasons are, they are all a
part of life and what happens in it. Everyone goes through hard and tough
periods (no matter what the degree of difficult) which enable one to develop
coping mechanisms to deal with those problems in stride. Unfortunately, not
everyone has the ability to develop good coping mechanisms; there are many
people who start to depend on unhealthy coping mechanisms. When this happens,
often times they develop mental illnesses such as variations of Depression,
variations of Anxiety, Bipolar Disorder, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and
many more. There are multiple ways in which the mind tries to cope with
stressors and although some find it possible, most find it extremely hard— leading
to mental instability and vulnerability. When conditions start to become
severe, people can start to form “alternate realities” and create fantasies and
illusions to hide their mind from the current state of reality. This occurs
when the mind starts to break down and “gives up”; it starts to form ways to
protect itself and ultimately, protect you. Many people think those people do
not actually exist and are only found in fictional stories, but it is quite the
contrary.
Blanche
is a fictional character in the play A
Streetcar Named Desire, by Tennessee Williams, who gradually develops a
mental illness due to how she copes with her past. Initially, she finds herself
at her sister’s apartment due to the loss of Belle Reve, the plantation. As the
play progresses, Stanley is the only person who sees Blanche for who she truly
is. Blanche constantly has an illusion that she is a woman of “high class” and
an extravagant lady who is “old-fashioned”; she feels Stella has stooped down
to a “lower-class” man who is barbaric. She lies about what happened with Belle
Reve and then she lies about why she left her old town and why she no longer
works as a teacher. Blanche feels as if no one wants the truth, everyone wants
something “magical” or better than the truth and Blanche tries to give them
that; she tries to give herself that. Blanche is unable to cope with the truth
of her past and who she really is. She purposely deceives peoples and constantly
finds ways to stay in the “dark” because literally and metaphorically, it
protects her and others from seeing the truth. Throughout the play, Blanche
shows severe signs of anxiety and possibly Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
(PTSD) due to her husband’s death.
Blanche can also be considered to show signs of Histrionic Personality
Disorder because she seeks the attention of others (such as Stella), has over
exaggerated emotions, inappropriate seductive behavior and the need of approval
from nearly everybody; she deceives Mitch into thinking she’s young, classy, and
“old-fashioned”. Blanche desperately wants everyone to find her attractive and
uses seductiveness as a way to get the “approval” she wants. At the end of the
play, she truly believes an imaginary man named “Shep Huntleigh” is coming to
get her and is taking her on a cruise and waits for him to come. As Blanche’s
identity stats to be revealed and her illusions all become destroyed by
Stanley, she starts to hear noises, music, and distorted voices with imagines
all over the walls. Blanche has a complete mental break down due to her loss of
protection by her fantasies and is forced to face reality in which Blanche
refuses to allow herself. She desperately grips onto her illusions as much as
possible, refusing to let them go even as the doctors take her away.
Although
Blanche is a fictional character, Sam is a real,
existing girl who started to create her own fantasies to escape the world she
lives in, as well. She engaged in the life of “celebrity posing”. She would
create fake accounts (on Myspace or AIM) of multiple celebrities and talked to
other people who were pretending to be celebrities, as well (i.e., Demi Lovato,
Selena Gomez). She had a huge secret world of almost multiple personalities;
she was herself and 10 other people all at once. They would all have group conversations,
via messaging, e-mail, and text, while pretending to be that celebrity. She
either admired those celebrities very highly or wanted to be one herself, but
could not. It started to spiral out of control to the point where she even
pretended to be non-celebrity people
and even started inventing her own friends; she made accounts for them from
stolen pictures online. Sam made up stories and lies about the “celebrities”
she talked to and about her fake friends and even her made-up boyfriends. She
got so caught up in that world that she nearly cut off the real world entirely.
She probably became so discontent with life, and maybe even a little bored,
that she had to pretend to be other people to escape her own world and live in
someone else’s. She made up her friends because she wanted to feel popular and
cool; she would have them comment on how “gorgeous” she was (the poor girl was
not considered very pretty by most people in our school). She purposely created
drama between her “friends” and herself and between her “friends” and her real
friends; it gave her some sort of thrill and excitement. She couldn’t deal with
facing what reality is every day and it got to the point that she needed to
live in a fantasy world of her own creation where she could control everything.
She became so obsessive with posing as other people that I wonder if she still
even has a grip on reality anymore, and that’s what life does to you. Life can
cause one to feel and go through things that can become so unbearable, or even
in her case: boring.
If a psychologist were to study both Blanche and Sam, he or
she would deem them both to have something called a Fantasy Prone Personality
(FPP). There are differences between the most common diagnosed mental illnesses—Depression,
Anxiety, Bi-Polar Disorder, and OCD— and FPP. Someone who suffers from having a
FPP finds a deep involvement with fantasies and imagination and extreme cases
can involve hallucinations. The major difference is most people who create
illusions typically don’t tell others and do not receive treatment. Blanche has
a more severe form where she lives in her own “dream world” and starts to find
it difficult to differentiate reality from fantasy. As her “dream world” starts
to fall apart and reality starts forcing its way in, she starts to have
hallucinations and delusions. Blanche starts to hear Polka music and see
shadows on the walls and images and voices start to become distorted as she
seems to nearly become insane at the end of the play. Sam, although she did not
start having hallucinations or delusions, she did indulge in fantasies and
dreams from what seems to be a large imagination. Whether she was unhappy or
bored with life, she still chose to create people and found the “best” way to
be someone who was not herself—even if it was only for a little while.
Eventually it got to the point where she even started to believe her own lies
and got entangled in them. She would actually get hurt from the drama she
created with herself. Although Blanche is a fictional character in a fictional
play with a more serious form of FPP, she can easily be related to by Sam
because they both choose to live in worlds opposite that of reality (including
the creation of imaginary people). People do not realize how harmful it is and think they are mentally stable and do
not wish to stop; mostly because the formation of these “alternate realties”
becomes addictive. Most people who suffer from illnesses such as Depression or
Bi-Polar Disorder do want help
because they do not like being or
feeling that way, opposite to the people who form alternate realities. It is something
they do like and it is not something
they want to stop—it makes one happy
as opposed to Depression which makes one sad.
Fantasy-prone people form favorable
alternate realties and find it difficult and heart wrenching to detach from
them.
Life is not easy and it never gets easier and sometimes it
gets in the way of living. There is only so much a person can take before
breaking down and once that happens, it is hard to rise back up. Although some
people are stronger than others, everyone
needs to find ways to cope with detrimental events that occur during a
lifetime. Life “throws” curveballs and
change-ups and it is hard to adjust back to normal after each one is “thrown”;
each one taking its toll on the human psyche. Sometimes, when life starts to
“throw” too many problems and when one’s tolerance becomes low, it can cause a
mental breakdown or an appearance of psychological illness. There are many that
are seemingly fairly common but FPP still continues to go unnoticed although
most people see it in children who create imaginary friends and become attached
to them for a long time. People see others like Blanche and Sam as simply
“crazy” when it is much more than that. They are truly unhappy with life and
feel as if they are trapped and wish to be anyone other than themselves and
because they cannot; this is their gateway to fantasies, illusions, and
alternate realities. They need something, anything, to escape reality. Everyone
goes through something where it almost feels as if one has no other choice but
to sugar coat things for themselves or stay in denial; otherwise, everyone would become completely insane.
"Fantasy prone personality." Wikipedia. Wikimedia
Foundation, Inc., 03 Mar 2014. Web. 9 Mar 2014.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasy_prone_personality>.
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