Hamlet Case

After the death of King Hamlet, Prince Hamlet meets the ghost of his father who demands he seek revenge against, now King, Claudius for killing him. Afterwards, Hamlet begins acting strange and paranoid around his family, friends, and the rest of the court who begin to accept that the Prince has gone insane. There is some amount of evidence that the aforementioned encounter with King Hamlet’s ghost triggers the psychotic disorder of the modern-diagnosis of Type I paranoid schizophrenia within Hamlet. Hamlet develops this affliction because of his father’s death by the hands of Claudius, Queen Gertrude’s marriage to Claudius shortly afterwards, and having to bear the burden of killing King Claudius to avenge his father’s death.

“Schizophrenia is a challenging disorder that makes it difficult to distinguish between what is real and unreal, think clearly, manage emotions, relate to others, and function normally.” Type I paranoid schizophrenia is characterized by the positive symptoms of schizophrenia; hallucinations, delusions, thought disorders, and movement disorders. Hamlet then shows symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia; “Paranoid-type schizophrenia is characterized by delusions and auditory hallucinations (hearing voices that don't exist) but relatively normal intellectual functioning and expression of affect.” The grief Hamlet experiences leads to a buildup of stress and eventually to a stress-induced hallucination; the ghost of King Hamlet. Horatio and the other guards saw the ghost in the beginning of the play, but that “may have been reality or a mix of reality and psychotic vision.” The second time the ghost appears, only Hamlet had a sense of the ghost, as Queen Gertrude said she didn’t hear the ghost speak, only themselves talking. Prince Hamlet views King Hamlet as a good, strong king and loving father, the death of whom leaves Prince Hamlet stricken with grief and without anyone to look up to which results in him thinking nobody can understand what he is going through. When Queen Gertrude marries Claudius very shortly after the King's death, Hamlet's intense grief builds up into more stress that he is still prohibited from expressing.

All of this building stress from Hamlet’s life is what’s causing the schizophrenic hallucinations of his father. E. Fuller Torrey, M.D. said that, "Brown and Birley published their 1968 study claiming that life stresses were important causes of schizophrenia" . Then from that particular study from 1968, Brown and Birley, "reported that schizophrenic patients experienced significantly more events than did the control subjects in the 3 months prior to onset" . It can be assumed, based on this study, that schizophrenics went through more traumatic events in a given time period than the control subjects. Therefore, it can also be assumed that the dramatic events caused the onset of schizophrenia in these patients. Prince Hamlet’s