Insanity of Lady Macbeth

Lady Macbeth is one the powerful characters in the play. She is the driving force that encourages Macbeth to take action on the prophecy. But, before blaming her for being an evil, let us look at her mental health.

Although the lady of the play has a very colorful character, one can quickly recognize the insanity and instability of Lady Macbeth’s actions at first glance. We have been introduced with her questionable mental status in the very beginning of the play when she received a letter from Macbeth telling her about the prophecy. This letter triggered her to have intense delusions and fantasies about her husband becoming the King of Scotland.

The second sign of her mental deterioration is that she was clearly under a delusion that she is much greater and more powerful and influential than she really is. Summoning supernatural spirits to unsex her and to give her the strength she need for Duncan’s murder is a behavior which psychologists would agree that she has problems separating fantasy from reality and is under some delusions of grandeur, which eventually could be an evidence of paranoid schizophrenia.

Besides the murder of Duncan, the lady does not show any other manic behavior until near the end of the play. At this point, she deals with sleepwalking. This might be a problem all on its own but trouble sleeping also suggests bipolar disorder. People with bipolar disorder experience dramatic ups and downs in their mood. Also her manic behavior comes and go, this reinforces the idea that she has bipolar disorder.

The guilt she feels also causes a lot of stress and anxiety. This stress comes out in the form of visual hallucinations. She imagines her hands covered by blood. This might be a symbol of guilt but it also implies schizophrenia. Although, we do not know the exact cause of her death,  we know that people living with schizophrenia at an increased risk of attempting suicide.

If she was alive today, she could be easily diagnosed with some sort of mental disease. We cannot be a hundred percent sure if being diagnosed would stop her from enticing Macbeth into wrongdoing. But I assume that it would make her condition more manageable.