Macbeth and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Essay

📌Category: Macbeth, Plays
📌Words: 780
📌Pages: 3
📌Published: 12 June 2022

Good afternoon everyone, I am Amanda Chadwick, and today I am here to represent my client, Macbeth. As you know, Macbeth is responsible for a few deaths, including King Duncan. Now, of course, you are going to think a guy like him needs the maximum sentence, but I need you to hear me out. Macbeth is not a bad guy, you see, he has fought in the war for us, and even named a war hero because of his many achievements on the battlefield. But fighting war has a huge effect on people, not just physically, but mentally too. Macbeth was hallucinating, having homicidal tendencies, and stopped sleeping. This is a result of PTSD from the war. Fighting In bloody battles day in and day out for so long is very traumatic, for many people. Macbeth just happens to be more affected by this than some others. He is a very brave and ambitious man, who was put into and affected by a horrible situation. Due to the traumatic events of the war, and suffering from PTSD, Macbeth is guilty due to reasons of insanity. We first saw him showing signs of PTSD when he hallucinates a dagger, but that was just the first visible sign. Macbeth had been struggling in his head for a while before this, all the thoughts starting to drive him mad. What started with disturbing, sad thought about the people he had to kill during war slowly turned into psychotic, angry thoughts about murder in his day-to-day life. After some time, the constant murder would become somewhat normal to you, just part of your everyday life. After a war, it would make sense that he would have homicidal thoughts. Think of it this way: you are a jury every day, and sometimes it is hard not to take your work home with you. Anyone really, if you spend so much time doing one thing over and over, it's going to get stuck in your head. Now imagine if your job was to fight and murder people all day long. That would stick with you when the day is done, wouldn’t it? The more you think about it, the more it will affect you. Eventually, the thoughts will become too much for you, making you go insane. I am not saying that Macbeth should not be punished for his actions. I am just saying that he is not the horrible monster you think he is. He is simply a man, struggling everyday just because of the way his brain works. I bet that if any of you were to live this man's life, you would be homicidal too. I think that Macbeth needs serious mental help more than he needs to go to prison, therapy and medication can go a long way with someone with severe PTSD.

 Let's think back to the first visible sign of Macbeth showing signs of PTSD, the dagger. He started to have homicidal thoughts, and getting so stressed out by them, he started to hallucinate. “Is this a dagger which I see before me, The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee. I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.” were his exact words when he saw that dagger. “Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible To feeling as to sight? or art thou but A dagger of the mind, a false creation, Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?” He knew it was fake, all in his head. He was trying to reason with himself, but it's hard to do that when something that seems so real to you is completely fake. Imagine how confused he had to have been, living with the horrifying thoughts he had every day, and now he starts to see things.

Macbeth was in a vulnerable state. It's easy to manipulate and mess with someone's head when they are like this. And that is exactly what Lady Macbeth did. When Macbeth told his wife he did not want to kill Duncan, she insulted his manhood, called him a coward, saying, “When you durst do it, then you were a man; And to be more than what you were, you would Be so much more the man”. She made him feel weak, like less of a man, because he simply didn’t want to murder someone. The more he hears these degrading words, especially from someone he loves, the more they will hurt and affect him. Being mad, upset, and embarrassed that his own wife doesn’t even see him as a man, but a coward, after he put so much effort, and energy to fight in war, after he put his life on the line and stayed brave even through the scariest time, well thats gonna have a huge effect on him. Of course, Macbeth needs to be put in jail. I am Simply saying, considering what he was going through, how scary this experience must have been for him. Whatever your decision is, just make sure you get him the help he needs.

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