Mental illness is an insidious monster that affects far more people than many realize.  Despite being common, it leaves little visible signs to show how much someone is suffering.  Depression, in particular, is a mental condition that can often go completely unnoticed until it is too late.  In the late 1800s, depression was often diagnosed as hysteria or neurasthenia.  These diagnoses would often be followed by a prescription of strict rest referred to as the rest cure.  “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a short story that depicts the rest cure and how it can prove detrimental to the patient that it was trying to cure.  Gilman strategically develops the narrator’s sentence over the course of the narrative, demonstrating the effects that the rest cure has on women’s mental health, which is to say that the rest cure fails to appropriately treat depression.