Michael Myers is a virtual catalog of mental illness. This page is a list of them.
Michael's disorders[]
Michael has a disorder called catatonia. Michael Myers is sometimes disabled from moving whenever he either sits or stands. This makes sense because it explains why Michael walks after his victims rather than running. He exhibits stupor also which is an inherited disorder. Samuel Loomis asserts that Michael was faking his catatonia to draw them away from his plans of escape and murdering his family. This is quite likely, and if this is true, Michael is more psychotic than catatonic.
In Michael Myers' case, he experiences an extreme loss of motor skills or he can even experience hyperactivity (in his case murdering people that he sees). When he was in Smith's Grove Sanitarium, he expressed rigid poses for hours and ignored any external stimuli. Michael also seems to be psychopathic, engaging in zoosadism and mass murder; however, he may also be sociopathic, which means emotions could be there, but in some cases, they are blunted or flat.
The syndrome is not recognized by the American Psychiatric Association but shares similarities with depersonalization disorder, which is recognized, and is characterized by feelings of loneliness, detachment, and indifference to the outside world.
It may be proven that Michael Myers may have schizophrenia, because of the reason most people that have schizophrenia experience catatonia also. The novelization of the original film gives more detail into Michael's schizophrenia, explaining that he saw visions of a disabled Celtic child named Enda, who murdered his crush after she refused to acknowledge him. He also claims that he heard "voices" that told him to hate people.
On the other hand, it is highly implied in all of the franchise (except in the 2007 Remake Timeline) that in some way, shape or form, Michael may not suffer from any mental illness or disorder and just kills because he is pure evil or, for the 4-6 Timeline, he is possessed by Thorn. This is further supported by the fact that Michael seems to be fully aware of his (wrong) actions and the pain he causes by killing, but continues to do so. Dr. Loomis also appears to be totally convinced that Michael is not suffering from any disorder, but is merely the incarnation of evil itself.
Furthermore, some fans on Reddit have brought the theory of solipsism intro the mix: According to this theory, the only thing alive, well, and above all existing in the universe, is the one's own existence; All what happens around (people, animals, events...) is the fruit of the one's own mind. The fans have hypothesized, therefore, that Michael suffers of this syndrome: he does not talk to anyone because it is useless to talk to "fake" people, always walks slowly as he chases a victim because he thinks they are just imaginary "toys", and he is determined to come back to his old house and kill his sister Laurie because he thinks that this comprises some kind of ritual for going to the real world. Something that has supported this theory is that in Halloween Kills (2021), it is mentioned that Michael used to look out of Judith's bedroom window as if he was trying to determine wheter what was around him was real or wheter he was trapped in an imaginary world.
List of disorders[]
- Psychopathy
- Schizophrenia
- Sociopathy
- Stupor
- Depersonalization/derealization