Earlier in the summer I went to the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ International Congress in London. My Cambridge colleague Neil Hunt, and his usual collaborators Trevor Turner and Mark Salter, were holding what has become a tradition at the conference: a Shakespeare debate. I went to similar sessions at meetings in 2014 (described here) and 2015 (described here). This year the question was whether the actions and especially the suicides of Romeo and Juliet should be attributed to (i) personality disorders or (ii) the problems of Veronese society. It was a landslide win for (ii). A morbid obsession with death, risk-taking behaviour, and impulsive violence, were cited on one side; signs of thoughtfulness, awareness of the thoughts of others, and violence in the wider family and the wider society, were cited on the other.
      Nobody involved thinks that Romeo and Juliet are very much like real people, and the use of technical psychiatric vocabulary is usually met with wry laughter. However, I participate (introducing the play’s plot and context, saying a few things about why some tests of character — a sense of proportion, for example — might not work in the same way in tragic heroes) with some seriousness. It’s interesting to see how these professionals think through stories and narratives, which bits of evidence they weigh, and then the special attitude to outcomes. One argument in favour of the social explanation was to put it to the audience that if Juliet survived, they’d advise family therapy first before considering any drastic intervention aimed at her alone, wouldn’t they? That’s obviously not something literary critics consider, but there is a role for ‘what if?’ questions somewhere in the process of understanding a play.
      What I am really after, and what I have not yet found, is whether there is some specific and not necessarily expected thing about Shakespeare’s characters that strikes psychiatrists as particularly effective in representing mental disorder, or igniting the curiosity of those who have to treat it. It may well be that there isn’t that much to it: Shakespeare is notably good at story and character and has a reputation that causes all kinds of people to value their engagement with his work. I do hold out some hope, though, that it’s a matter of language too: that the particular sort of dramatic poetry we get in his plays may contribute to the persuasiveness of the portraits of psychology we get there.

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This is also my summer sign-off. I am unlikely to post before the beginning of September. Best wishes to all!