Shakespeare was nothing if not the master of the human heart. His understanding of human emotions, intentions and desires is probably peerless in English literature.
But I would like to suggest something more. Shakespeare was also a master of the human mind. And, as a master of the mind, he dealt both directly and subtly with what we would today describe as mental illness.
Take, for example, Hamlet. Of all Shakespeare’s plays this is perhaps the most detailed character study. We find a young man plunged into depression at the death of his father. He lives a melancholy that is brooding and introverted; a man obsessed with revenge, but paralysed by thought and inaction. His famous soliloquy “To be or not to be” is, I believe, nothing less than a person asking whether they should live or not live. In the same play we find Ophelia, spurned by Hamlet’s romantic rejection, fall into despair and, without help, takes her own life.
The Scottish play, Macbeth, also displays behaviours and experiences we would now associate with mental illness. There are the famous lines from the play – Macbeth, faced with the act of murdering a king, hallucinates the instrument of his act: “Is this a dagger I see before me”? Lady Macbeth, obsessively washing her hands to clear a spot of incriminating blood that only she can see; an obsession that we might describe as psychotic.
Or Othello, where the main character is driven to a point of pathological paranoia and delusional jealousy by the manipulation of Iago, to the extent that he murders the object of his love, Desdemona.
King Lear, the poor old man descending into dementia. In the same play we come across the eccentric character of Edgar, disguised as Old Tom, perhaps a sufferer of schizophrenia.
What are we to make of these depictions of what we might call mental illness?
The first is the intensity of the phenomena experienced by the characters. These are people who consider murder, self-injury, regicide and even killing the object of one’s desire. They are not mere fancies, to be brushed aside, but powerful motivators for often terrible acts.
The second interesting observation is that all these mental and emotional states are derived from human situations. They arise out of such everyday emotions as greed, jealousy, doubt, sadness and isolation as well as some people’s experience of trauma. These people, with their mental states, live and breathe and feel a very human world.
The last point has, perhaps, already been made… these states are not something that are strictly abnormal, non-human. They are an intrinsic part of the human experience. And, perhaps, we can learn from this insight – to see what we now call mental illness not as a deep abnormality, but as an intrinsic part of the human condition. In practice, this means approaching people experiencing mental health issues with respect, care and acceptance, as full members of their communities; not as people defined by an ‘abnormality’.
Dr. Richard Schweizer, Policy Officer at One Door Mental Health richard.schweizer@onedoor.org.au.
To receive new blogs from Dr. Richard Schweizer subscribe to our eNews.
Dr Richard Schweizer
Image credit news.com.au