After the birth of her daughter Katharine, she developed postpartum depression which usually occurs as a result of hormonal changes, psychological adjustment to motherhood and tiredness. For years she battled this disorder suffering "a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending towards melancholy - and beyond" until she turned to a notorious neurologist named Silas Weir Mitchell. Weir advised Gilman to stick to her rest cure, forbidding her to work another day in her life. “..He concluded that there was nothing serious and sent me home with the solemn advice to 'live domestic life as much as possible (245)”. Like the narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” this did not improve Gilman but worsened his anguish. He obeyed the doctor's instructions for only more than three months before he came "so close to the edge of utter mental ruin that he could see beyond it" (245). Then she abandoned the cure of rest and moved to California, divorced her husband, remarried and dedicated herself to the world of literature and politics (232). Unlike Gilman, the narrator succumbs to madness at the end of the story. Gilman uses this alternate ending to his story to bring national attention to the rest cure problem and not to "make people crazy, but to stop people from being crazy" (246). And it worked. In the 1850s, postpartum depression was recognized nationally by medical professionals as a disorder