Essay On Macbeth's Mental Illness

In the time of Shakespeare's Macbeth, modern science and medical conditions were yet to be discovered and first diagnosed, so problems with medicine were blamed on the Protestant Christian God. With the knowledge of today, Macbeth would most likely be diagnosed with psychosis, specifically post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), developing into schizophrenia. The term schizophrenia was not widely applied until the 1800s, so Macbeth would not have been diagnosed with such a name. In Rupert Goold’s cinematic re-interpretation of Macbeth, set somewhere between the years of 1939-1950, Macbeth’s mental illness is brought to life, not only adding scenery to the story, but body language to help display emotions from the characters. The deterioration of Macbeth’s sanity following the murder of Duncan led to his post traumatic stress and eventually Schizophrenia.

Come, let me clutch thee. I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible to feeling as to sight? Or art thou but a dagger of the mind, a false creation, proceeding from the heat-oppressèd brain?” (Macbeth Act 2. Scene 1. 33-40). The first, and blatantly obvious, sign of Macbeth’s illness is the hallucination of the dagger before him. This symptom indicates Macbeth’s mindset is recognizably off from a regular mind, but his realization of the illusion sets him apart from a schizophreniac. The American Psychiatric Association describes moments of psychotic schizophrenia as “episodes in which the patient is unable to distinguish between real and unreal experiences (Parekh).” At this point, his ability to distinguish between real and unreal experiences displays he is experiencing an intermediate level of psychosis, not schizophrenia. After Banquo is killed, Macbeth sees Banquo’s ghost on the dinner table, an