Examples Of Mental Illness In Macbeth

Mental illness affects approximately 1 in 4 people, including Macbeth from Shakespeare’s famous play, The Tragedy of Macbeth. Illnesses like schizophrenia and psychopathy impact about one percent of the population. In the play, Macbeth expresses worrisome traits of both of these disorders. Schizophrenia and psychopathy are both extremely deteriorating to the mind and he very well could have suffered from not just one, but both of these illnesses. He has the tendencies to be a psychopath while also having the tendencies to be a schizophrenic, particularly because of the hallucinations and paranoia. With all of that, he also fit almost all of the criteria to be considered insane in a courtroom. Macbeth was an all around mentally ill and unstable
As stated by Geiman in Seeing Through the Eyes of Schizophrenia, “People with schizophrenia typically experience symptoms such as auditory hallucinations, delusions, disorganized speech and odd or unusual behavior” (2). A symptom of schizophrenia is being delusional and seeing hallucinations, and an example of when this happened is when he was going to kill king Duncan. When he was going to go through with the deed of killing the king, he imagined a dagger in his mind that wasn’t actually there. When he saw it, it confirmed that he had to kill the king and it almost led him to kill king Duncan. In his famous dagger soliloquy, Macbeth said, “Is this a dagger which I see before me… art thou but a dagger of the mind, a false creation, proceeding from the heat oppressed brain?” (II.ii. 33...39). Macbeth fabricated a false dagger to help show him that he needed to kill king Duncan. Another instance that shows his schizophrenic traits is when he hallucinated
For starters, the expression, the courtroom definition, and the psychiatrist term of the word “insanity” are all different and all have different connotations. In order to be considered insane in today’s court, you have to be completely separated from reality. As described by Vaknin, “A perpetrator should go unpunished - and be hospitalized instead - only if he is found to be completely divorced from reality by diagnosticians from both sides, a far cry from today’s insanity defense” (2). To prove that a suspect is in fact separated from reality, a few things have to be proven. The first thing to be proven is if the suspect had a diminished capacity. Macbeth showed that he was mentally impaired when he brought the daggers back instead of putting them with the guards and smothering them with blood. Although he knew that he was killing, he was not stable enough to carry out the entire crime. After the first crime, he could not control his behavior anymore. It became out of hand and he wasn’t able to control it anymore. He felt the urge to kill; which proves that he had an irresistible impulse which could no longer be controlled. In a way, he also lacked criminal intent. While he intended to kill, he did it because he believed that killing the king was what he was meant to do.