Of Mental Illnesses In 'The Boy Who Couldn T Stop Washing'
588 Words3 Pages
Mental Illnesses That Are a Result of Stress The play “Hamlet” and the book The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Washing both have characters that have significant mental illnesses. Shakespeare’s character that he created, Hamlet, shows symptoms that lead me to believe that he has Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). PTSD might not have been identified or labeled at the time that “Hamlet” was written, but a significant amount of Hamlet’s actions, conversations, and emotions can fall under what people call PTSD today. The author of The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Washing, Judith L. Rapoport, describes a man who has severe Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD). This man struggles on a day to day basis with irrational thoughts and urges that cripple his ability to function normally.…show more content… He shows several PTSD symptoms such as “grief [and] anger” (Kahn 1). In act one of “Hamlet”, Hamlet is full of grief because of his beloved father’s sudden and unexpected death and has a lot of anger because his mother remarried his uncle only about a month after his father died. Hamlet claims that the “grief…inside [of him] is beyond pretense.” (Shakespeare 39). Hamlet has a “father who has been murdered, [and] a mother who has been defiled” (Shakespeare 223) and is “spurn[ed] on… to [his] revenge.” (Shakespeare 223). Anger and grief are two personality traits that certainly can be used to characterize Hamlet at this point is the play. These emotions stem from his PTSD which was caused by the murder of his father King