Kimmy Martin
Shakespeare
Mini Paper
11/23/15
According to a survey taken by the Substance
Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 43.8 million adults in the
United States were estimated to have mental illness in the year 2013. Among those adults, there were only 19.6
million that received mental health services.
This suggests a 24.2 million gap in which adults are not receiving the
help that they need to deal with their mental health. Some may suggest that it is their income or
insurance coverage that keeps them from receiving this help, but I suggest that
a great part of it is the fear of a mental illness stereotype that may
accompany getting the help that they need.
Serious mental illnesses are the results of mental illness cases that do
not receive the necessary medical attention.
Although fictional, the cases found in Shakespeare’s King Lear, Othello,
and Macbeth demonstrate the effects that result from a lack of necessary
medical attention in the face of mental illness.
King Lear is an important character
to look at when it comes to the discussion of mental illnesses. In the beginning of the play, it is not
evident that King Lear has already developed his mental disabilities. Instead, we see him as an older man who begins
to see his own weaknesses in a new sort of reality because of his old age. Shakespearean H. Somerville further describes
King Lear in this light saying, “Always an over-generous man, he became more
generous than ever. Always a rash and
hasty man, he became more rash and hasty.
His reasoning powers and judgement, never very good, had deteriorated;
and his fiery temper, never under proper control, had become almost
ungovernable” (100). This is something
we could say of almost any grandparent.
The older they get, they become more “stuck in their ways” and their
personality is only solidified. There is
also evidence the King Lear recognized that he was getting old for the pleas,
“O, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven!
Keep me in temper: I would not be mad!”
Although this is his desire, we see that he does develop mental illness,
but not simply by cause of old age.
The first reason comes from the fear that he has of becoming
insane. I like to think that he maybe
had a close relative, friend, or even his spouse that we know nothing about who
had a sort of mental illness. Because of
what he has seen and experienced in accordance with mental illness, he is
desperate to not become like that. This
is may be one of the main sources of the mental illness stereotyping
today. We may know someone who is close
to us, or even someone who isn’t, who suffers from a serious mental illness. It is one of our first reactions to tell ourselves
that we are not like that and that we will never become like that. When in reality, that may be one of our
deepest fears – the possibility of becoming the person we use to describe
mental illness.
The other thing that may have driven him to his mental state at the
end of the play is the recurring events that led him to anger, dissatisfaction,
and loneliness. Not only did events take
place to arouse these emotions, but they came from his reactions to his daughters’
choices which makes the emotions even greater and even more hurtful. This is something that has commonly been an
attack on a healthy mind as a synopsis of mental illness written from a medical
perspective states, “How much greater would be his danger, if instead of a
faithful wife, devoted children, and a placid existence, the last few years of
his life had witnessed the wreck of all his domestic joys, the rise of enemies
and the success of the harassing measures they had undertaken against him” (McFarland) . When the people closest to us do things that
hurt us or that we may interpret as hurting us, it is easy for us to develop
strong emotions inside of us like anger, loneliness, and mistrust. The more that we dwell on the relationships
that evoke these feelings, the more we will push our minds to feel like we
always have these feelings and we can’t break away from them.
By looking at what drove him to develop mental illness, we cannot
blame him for having developed it. If
any one of us were to be so mentally divided between the heightened emotions
and imperfections of old age, fear of going insane, and the emotional rollercoaster
that hits King Lear one after another throughout the play, we too would
probably have at least a temporary mental illness. This suggests that mental illness is not far
from the realms in which the mass majority of people live.
The point that seems to have driven him to his worst is when he
believes that he has finally gone mad.
Again, this comes about by the association of another person who is
believed to be mad. Tom of Bedlam enters
talking as if a spirit is following him and what is King Lear’s reaction? He says, “Hast thou given all to thy two
daughters? And art thou come to this?” (Lear
3.1.1850). When King Lear sees Tom, he
immediately projects himself on the qualities of madness and believes that he,
himself, is no different from the mad man in front of him. From this point, we see Lear become the mad
man that he believes he is.
When people believe they are something, they develop themselves to
be that image that they have in their mind.
In a positive light, this is how people are counseled to reach their
goals. How many times have we heard that
if you want to be a doctor, you have to imagine yourself as a doctor? This principle applies to mental illness as
well and shows how easy it is to submit to an image that you believe you fit
into. So King Lear began to see himself
as the stereotype that he struggled so long against, but even with all of the
mental struggle he had been going through, he gives up and allows himself to
become what he sees. This is where the
mental health services would do King Lear a lot of good because they are meant
to help people to not be defined by their mental condition. If Lear continued to struggle against his
fear of going insane and his overly emotional reactions, and had help in doing
so, he would have been able to continue living a normal life. Yes, he would still feel all of these
emotions, but the emotions wouldn’t drown everything else out and he would have
been able to reason and perhaps change the end of the story.
This is the section of my paper where I have ideas but they haven't been developed into paragraphs yet.
Macbeth – the struggle between whether
he should do something or whether he shouldn’t do it. Fear for himself is the cause for him to kill
as a defensive response. He uses the
word fear frequently and that supports the idea that fear is the leading cause
to his mental illness
Becomes paranoid which causes
delusions and thus amplifies his paranoia.
Spends so much energy mentally trying to conceal that fear that it makes
it even harder
Banquet scene really shows his
explosion.
“Some
say he’s mad; others, that less hate him, /Do call it valiant fury; but, for
certain, /He cannot buckle his distemper’d cause /Within the belt rule.”
“His mental conflicts previous to
the murder and the tortures of remorse for having done the deed determine his
insanity. His insanity, once established
(delusions of persecution), is responsible for his subsequent career of
bloodshed” (Somerville).
So it is the internal conflicts
before the murder that are the mental illness.
If at this point he would have received counseling or medication that
aided with the hallucinations then the first murder could have been avoided as
well as the murders that followed
Othello - Has to adjust himself to the
society in Venice which he knows very little about while in his own mind he is
trying to withstand his own feelings of inferiority because he is of a
completely different race. This comes to
a peak within the marriage because if he is already feeling inferior in the
rest of his life it is easy for him to feel inferior in his marriage as
well. This is why Iago could so easily
get to him, he was already shaken up mentally on his own personal value.
“Nor from mine own weak merits will
I draw /The smallest fear, or doubt of her revolt; /For she had eyes, and chose
me.” Trying to suppress his thoughts,
but it demonstrates how slowly this seed of doubt and inferiority is growing in
his mind
The Handkerchief scene shows his
explosion and how he is over-analyzing everything and making it a bigger deal
so that it fits in with what he thinks is going on; what his mind wants him to
prove so that he can stop going back and forth between this two-sided conflict.
“O, now, forever /Farewell the
tranquil mind! Farewell content!
/Farewell the plumed troop, and the big wars…”
This is him absolutely giving up in the one area in his life that he had
confidence.
Medical care wasn’t really an option for them
Whipping, Bedlam (confinement),
tried various herbs – which demonstrates that the necessary health services
were not available mostly due to lack of education.
See Shakespeare dictionary of
quotations and (Thiher)
“Revels in Madness Insanity in Medicine and Literature”
From Macbeth “Canst thou not
minister to a mind diseased; /Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow; /Raze out
the written troubles of the brain; /And, with some sweet oblivious antidote, /Cleanse
the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff /Which weighs upon the heart?”
Du Lauren a doctor of the
seventeenth century said, “Consider the action of a frenetic or a maniac,
you'll find nothing human there; he bites, he screams, he bellows with a savage
voice, rolls burning eyes, his hair stands on end, he throws himself about and
often kills himself so. Look at a melancholic and how he lowers himself so that
he becomes a com-panion of beasts and only likes solitary places” (Thiher)
Medical care is an option today that isn’t being taken advantage of
Need research on this…
Other ideas I came across:
Freud – taught that mental illness
was caused by internal conflicts of the conscious
One resource shows how this was
proved correct in modern society
Internal
conflicts are the causes to the mental illnesses in King Lear, Macbeth, and
Othello
Works Cited
Brown. "Insanity in
Shakespeare". Boston: Little Brown Books, 1978. Web.
Jackson, Ken. Separate Theaters. Newark:
University of Delaware Press, 2005. Print.
Kellogg, A. O. Shakespeare's Delineation of
Insanity, Imbecility, and Suicide. New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1866.
Print.
McFarland. The Trial of Daniel McFarland for
the Shooting of Albert D. Richardson the Alleged Seducer of His Wife.
Buffalo: William S. Hein & Co., 2007. Web. 19 November 2015.
Peat, Derek. Mad for Shakespeare: a
Reconsideration of the Importance of Bedlam. Vol. 21:1. Australian and New
Zealand Association of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 2004. Web. 18
November 2015.
Robin, P. Ansell. The Old Physiology in
English Literature. London: J. M. Dent & Sons LTD., 1911. Print.
Somerville, H. Madness In Shakespearian
Tragedy. London: The Richards Press LTD., 1969. Print.
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services
Administration. Results from the 2013 Nation Survey on Drug Use and Health:
Mental Health Findings. NSDUH Series H-49, HHS Publication No. (SMA)
14-4887. Rockville: Substance Abuse and Mental Health Servey Administration,
2014. Web. 21 November 2015.
Thiher, Allen. Revels in Madness: Insanity in
Medicine and Literature. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press,
1999. Print.
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