Depression, Suicidality, and Shakespeare

"To be or not to be, that is the question."

For many, this oft-quoted phrase from Hamlet brings back terrors of ninth grade English class when our teachers would regale us of the genius of the Bard. Meanwhile, this seemed like a massive slog to get through an entire play written in a poetry that was from a bygone era that was as incomprehensible to us as reading Greek.

However, if we examine Shakespeare's words closer, Mrs. Rhodes from honors English was on to something — Shakespeare was commenting on something so universal about mental health. Hamlet, stricken by grief, traumatized by his mother's actions, is asking a very fundamental question that many people suffering with crippling depression ask: what is the point of living?

Why should we march on when we may have to "suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune?" Hamlet is asking — how can a human carry on when we are at the mercy of the external, awful events that could happen to us, misfortunes that are sometimes totally out of our control?

Hamlet is asking whether it is "nobler" "to die — to see, no more; and by sleep to say we end the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks" that are a natural part of life. It shows us that asking — why keep going? What is the point of it all? — is not a modern question, but one that has plagued all of humanity for centuries.

But to that end, we must consider Hamlet as a character. He is a late adolescent, recently returned from university, overly cerebral and intellectual. He comes home to a domestic family disaster: his father is dead, his mother has remarried his uncle, and the ghost of his father has told him that he has been murdered by said uncle. Given all of this, Hamlet falls into a state of despair and depression, and his very personality forces him into a state of inaction and over-intellectualization — and from there sprouts the most famous soliloquy in the world.

Hamlet, in the end, chooses a route that ends in his self-destruction, and the deaths of almost all of the major characters of the play.

What can we learn from this? That clinical depression can make our minds turn to the darkest of places — where we have no idea of how we can overcome "a sea of troubles" in life. However, I think we can persevere. I think Hamlet is a warning lesson for us all: that being trapped in a mind of depression, not seeking or asking for help, can have tragic and destructive consequences.