Reporting from Canada, #6: As Shakespeare and We Liked It

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PSYCHIATRIC VIEWS ON THE DAILY NEWS

“The world would crack in two if these two individuals could not be together for the payout of their union to lead like the force of nature that it should.” - Jennifer Lee

Imagine this. The story starts with what looks like armed immigration officers chasing an escapee from brutal incarceration. Then a younger brother is threatened by his older brother who controls their inheritance. The current Governor, their uncle, who had banished the prior Duchess, orders the younger brother to be harmed. However, the younger brother is warned and falls into mutual love at first sight with the Governor’s niece, only to be separated as they flee into the forest. It is snowing, as it is in a winter cold spell.

Got it?

Does this sound anything like our current country? It should. The government grows more authoritarian and threatening. Immigrants are being banished and homeless individuals with mental illnesses may be rounded up. The President is a younger brother. The climate is changing worryingly, though warmer here and now.

However, originally the play in question was written in 1599 by Shakespeare and titled “As You Like It.” Given human nature is what it is, there is much similarity between our time and theirs, what with an aging monarch, foreign threats, growing state control, economic volatility, increased productivity demands, and a “Little Ice Age.”

In this Shakespeare play, several couples survive many tests of commitments for each other and the growing exiled community in the forest. Surviving and thriving depend on creativity and cooperation. Each couple almost needs to act as if they and the world depend on their relationship’s positive success. As they do so, the governor apparently gives up and becomes a religious hermit.

In our time and our profession, the challenge is what psychiatry can contribute to addressing our individual and social psychiatric problems. Perhaps the most like a prototypical psychiatrist is the philosophical Jacques, who seems both insightful and detached. He posits 7 developmental stages of man to process well—baby, child, lover, soldier, judge, elder, second childhood—later to be developed further by Erik Erickson’s psychosocial stages of development.

Even in his wisdom, Shakespeare does not provide all the answers in his archetype play. So far, it seems we are trying old “tried and true” methods, but that does not seem to be working well enough or fast enough. Do we need to revive some of Shakespeare’s strategy of exile, retreat, disguises, and transformative community building, based on social relationships ranging from couples in love and clinical therapeutic alliances not compromised by political preferences, that can be the basis for a peaceful and joyous society?

This adaptation by director Chris Abraham at the Stratford Festival 2025 in Canada points the way forward.

Dr Moffic is an award-winning psychiatrist who specialized in the cultural and ethical aspects of psychiatry and is now in retirement and retirement as a private pro bono community psychiatrist. A prolific writer and speaker, he has done a weekday column titled “Psychiatric Views on the Daily News” and a weekly video, “Psychiatry & Society,” since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged. He was chosen to receive the 2024 Abraham Halpern Humanitarian Award from the American Association for Social Psychiatry. Previously, he received the Administrative Award in 2016 from the American Psychiatric Association, the one-time designation of being a Hero of Public Psychiatry from the Speaker of the Assembly of the APA in 2002, and the Exemplary Psychiatrist Award from the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill in 1991. He presented the third Rabbi Jeffrey B. Stiffman lecture at Congregation Shaare Emeth in St. Louis on Sunday, May 19, 2024. He is an advocate and activist for mental health issues related to climate instability, physician burnout, and xenophobia. He is now editing the final book in a 4-volume series on religions and psychiatry for Springer: Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, Christianity, and now The Eastern Religions, and Spirituality. He serves on the Editorial Board of Psychiatric Times.