Mental illness can be a virus. It attaches itself to those who have wild thoughts, actions and understandings of a world known and unknown. It strikes the soul, immediately dragging a lovable being into anxiety, pain and loss. In Shakespeare's play Hamlet, its main character, Hamlet, falls ill. It gets to him through the actions of his friends, his enemies, and even his own family. The hardest thing to understand is whether Hamlet's madness is entirely real or whether it is a staged act of revenge. However, whatever the reality of his psychotic mind, the real question is what caused all this to happen. In 1601, when Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, Hamlet was diagnosed as suffering from melancholy, but with today's high technology and knowledge, he would have been diagnosed with bipolar I disorder. In Shakespeare's time, it did not exist no concept of depressive illness, although melancholy was well known in his time. In 1900, the Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud produced a work called The Interpretation of Dreams, returning to the idea that dreams allow for psychic examination, that dreams that happen contain some kind of psychological meaning that can be caused by interpretation. Freud says that each dream will emerge as an emotional structure, full of importance, and which can be assigned to a designated place in psychic activities. According to Freud's original thoughts, dreams have two contents, an overt content which is the dream one actually experiences and a hidden content which is the meaning of the dream as discovered through interpretation. According to Freud's Dream Interpretation, we all have wishes and desires. . One of the most common repressed desires is the desire for sexuality...... middle of article ...... around your twenties, when the first symptoms of bipolar disorder appear. Bipolar I disorder consists of one or more manic or mixed episodes (symptoms of mania and depression occurring almost every day for at least a week) and one or more major depressive episodes. Some symptoms may include feelings of hopelessness, sadness or emptiness, feelings of worthlessness or guilt, thoughts of death or suicide. Treatment for bipolar mania may include lithium, anticonvulsants, antipsychotics, and benzodiazepines. Shakespeare shows that Hamlet goes through many mood changes throughout the play. Sometimes it seems like he is depressed, hyperactive, excited and in a bad mood. People simply came to the conclusion that Hamlet simply went mad during the play. Although upon closer inspection and examination, Hamlet is found to have clear symptoms that make it possible to diagnose bipolar I disorder..