Lady Macbeth Insane

William Shakespeare's play "Macbeth" displays how the psychological needs of a person drive him or her to act the way they do. Shakespeare, throughout his various works, gives us several perfect examples of just such characters. However, one of these characters seems a touch more unstable, considerably more insane, than any other figure conceived by the playwright. The woman in question is Lady Macbeth, fallen queen of Scotland; of all the tragic characters portrayed in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Lady Macbeth is perhaps the single most tormented and increasingly unstable. Lady Macbeth fulfills her role among the nobility and is well respected like Macbeth. King Duncan calls her "our honored hostess." Macbeth’s wife, a deeply ambitious woman who
Lady Macbeth’s questionable mental status becomes apparent the first time the reader is introduced to her character in Act 1, Scene 5. In this scene, the lady has just received a letter from Macbeth informing her of the weird sisters’ prophecy that he shall become King of Scotland. She immediately begins to plot the murder of Duncan, and starts off on fantasies and delusions of her husband ruling the country. Her misled intentions are first expressed in the lines “Glamis thou art, and Cawdor, and shalt be What thou art promised. Yet I do fear thy nature. It is too full o’ the milk of human kindness To catch the nearest way. Thou wouldst be great; Art not without ambition, but without the illness should attend it.” (Iv.15-20). Upon observations of Lady Macbeth, I have diagnose Lady Macbeth with post-traumatic stress that is characterized by anxiety that can develop after exposure to a terrifying event or ordeal in which grave physical harm occurred or was threatened, not only to this person but to others as well. Although we see two different sides of the Macbeth family, we cannot just assume that they caused each other’s downfalls; but because of their mental disorders, they devised their own
One definition of hyper arousal is having a difficult time falling or staying asleep. We can infer that Lady Macbeth is having difficulty sleeping when the gentlewoman is speaking to the doctor: “I have seen her rise from her bed, throw on her nightgown . . . yet all this while in a most fast sleep.” (Act V Scene 1) While sleepwalking Lady Macbeth not only re-experiences Duncan’s death “Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?” (Act V Scene 1) but also the murders her husband commits “No more o’ that, my lord, no more!” (Act V Scene 1). A second, stranger delusion she entertains is that she is, in fact, summoning mythological spirits to give her the strength to murder Duncan; the woman is heard calling out, “Come, you spirits/ that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,/ and fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full/ Of direst cruelty” (I.v.40-43). Psychologists would agree that such delusions of grandeur, and trouble separating fantasy from reality, are positive signs of paranoid schizophrenia. This episode is particularly important, for the fact it marks the first step of Lady Macbeth’s mental deterioration. Avoidance is the next symptom and it has been found that people with PTSD often try to avoid or “push away” their emotions about a traumatic experience and emotions in general. Lady Macbeth has