Within American society lies a silent and invisible killer; It afflicts a quarter of the world's population, causes eight million deaths every year, and its mortality is often underestimated due to a lack of physical stigma. While mental illness may not cause direct physical harm, the torment these sufferers endure on a daily basis is not to be taken lightly. Victims show low self-esteem and have a negative view of the world. If their intrusive thoughts are left untreated, victims may even take their own lives. Additionally, the voices in their head tell them that they don't deserve positive experiences, love, and even food. Lia, the protagonist of Laurie Halse Anderson's Wintergirls, is one of many unfortunate teenagers who have developed a deadly eating disorder due to her chronic depression and desire to be perfect. After a lifetime of battling mental illness, Lia was starting to recover from self-deprecating thoughts and even became close friends with an eccentric girl named Cassie. After several years, their friendship became strained and they separated. Lia didn't think about it until she received a disturbing midnight phone call from Cassie, which she rejected. It turns out that was the last phone call Cassie would ever make, because the next morning, her childhood friend was found dead in a motel room under mysterious circumstances. Subsequently, Lia is burdened with guilt over her failure to prevent her friend's death, leading to a relapse into her calorie restriction and suicidal ideation. Lia's near-death experience, brought on by depression after the death of her friend in the novel Wintergirls, accentuates the importance of supportive friendships in facilitating recovery from a life-threatening mental illness. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Lia's rapidly deteriorating health is triggered by grief over the death of her best friend, underscoring her complex relationship with mental illness. Lia has suffered from a variety of mental illnesses including depression, anxiety and anorexia. After the second hospitalization she had almost completely recovered, although some intrusive thoughts still remained. When he learned of Cassie's death, his mental state began to deteriorate rapidly and his mental illness completely regained control over his life. Lia's ever-increasing curiosity about the details of Cassie's death is emphasized as she recounts, “What was [Cassie] doing there? What was he thinking? Did it hurt? There's no point in asking why, even if everyone will. I know why... I can't believe he ran out of answers before me. I need to run, to fly, flapping my wings so hard that I can't hear anything over my heartbeat. Rain, rain, rain, it drowns me. Was it easy?" (Anderson 14). Clearly, Lia is haunted by the fact that she isolated herself from her friend in her final months, even refusing to answer her friend's phone calls on the night of her death. Although she insists to her family and friends friends that she no longer cares about Cassie, her mind is haunted by her role in Cassie's death and a disconcerting desire to mend her friendship. Her conflicting thoughts are intensified by her mental illnesses at her friend's funeral, where inside the casket, “[Cassie] blinks – once, twice – opens her eyes wide and looks me straight in the eyes. She reaches out and touches her hair… Cassie sits down slowly... and laughs, a low, dirty sound that only came out attwo or three in the morning... I blink. She disappeared from the coffin” (Anderson 88). The ghost of her friend coming out of the coffin was incredibly vivid to Lia, real or not, and had a profound impact on her mental health. She was once able to block the feeling of guilt over her friend's death through unhealthy coping mechanisms such as self-harm and starvation, but now that her friend was "haunting" her, she has no choice but to face the ghosts of his past and sets out to appease Cassie's spirit. As she spends more time with Cassie's ghost, not only does her anorexia and depression worsen, but she also alienates the friends and family who are her only remaining ties to the real world. Literary critic Hsin-Chun Tsai highlights how Lia has become so preoccupied with her illness that she ignores all her problems and rejects all the positive parts of her life, becoming increasingly trapped in a cycle of self-starvation: “When everything boils down to one thing and one thing only, size and number, these girls become selfish and isolated. As Russell perceptively observes, '[t]heir life narrows down to the number of calories in an orange, the number on a scale... Lia becomes the victim in her battle with herself'” (Tsai). Despite being so close to recovery, the tragedy of Cassie's death triggered a relapse in Lia, reducing her physical and mental functioning so much that she only had the energy to speak to her friend's hallucination. Little did Lia know that the isolation she endured would lead her to become what she sought to avoid: a "wintergirl." Lia's interactions with the mythical "wintergirl", a dark manifestation of Cassie's spirit who is neither alive nor dead, cause Lia to resent her mental illness and desire healing on a larger scale. Throughout the novel's exposition, the Winter Girl is described by Lia and Cassie as a seemingly alluring and desirable future with a secretly bleak outcome: “We held hands as we walked along the gingerbread path in the forest, the blood that dripped from our fingers. We danced with witches and kissed monsters. We turned us into winter girls and when she tried to leave I dragged her back into the snow because I was afraid of being alone” (Anderson 99). The winter girl has clear connotations with anorexia, in which the patient constantly dances with death, the figurative "witches and monsters", to achieve an unhealthy and thin structure. Those with anorexia believe they are in control, until they realize they cannot return to a normal eating schedule and are afraid of gaining weight. Instead of achieving happiness through weight loss, Cassie achieved an early death and Lia would have soon followed if she hadn't changed her ways. Literary critic Hsin-Chun Tsai explains: “In the end, she is the one who is consumed. She becomes the "winter girl" who is trapped between the world of the living and the dead, an in-between existence that prompts the spirit of her best friend to call her "a ghost with a beating heart" who will soon cross the border to meet now . -Cassie dead” (Tsai). Lia realizes that she is close to death, but she doesn't know how to recover because she is "afraid of being alone". Her anorexic habits are the only coping mechanisms she has ever known. Lia's life is so devoid of happiness that she feels she has no purpose other than to await death. Her mental illnesses have physically and mentally drained her of all hope. Lia initially even resents her friend for dying and "finding a way out" of the pain of everyday life before Lia herself. However, the more Lia dissociates from the real world and interacts with the.