Did Shakespeare know Schizophrenia?

Abstract

There is doubt whether schizophrenia, the most common and most devastating serious mental illness, existed much more than 200 years ago. Many authors who have written recently on the history of schizophrenia suggest that it is a disease that first appeared towards the end of the eighteenth century and rapidly increased in prevalence throughout the nineteenth. Cooper & Sartorius (1977) ask “Why are good descriptions of what can now be recognized as chronic schizophrenia so scarce in European medieval and earlier literature?” and they associate schizophrenia with industrialisation. Torrey (1980) argues that although descriptions of madness, including hallucinations and delusions, date to ancient times, schizophrenia as we know it with an onset in early adulthood and progressive deterioration, is not described. He associates schizophrenia with civilisation, and proposes an infectious cause. Hare (1979, 1982) supports this hypothesis, providing detailed evidence for a real increase in hospitalised psychiatric patients who most probably had schizophrenia in the last century (Hare, 1983), and also states that there are no good earlier descriptions of schizophrenia.