Does Amanda in "The Glass Menagerie" have any mental illness?For she tends to nagging, and her emothion seems unstable.

There is no evidence in the play that would support the
claim that Amanda suffers from any kind of condition. However, there is enough proof
that shows that Amanda lives under a severe case of self-denial and unfinished
businesses. That, in itself, is not indicative of a medical condition, nor of a
psychological disorder, but mostly of a social inability to cope with change and
reality.

The way she nags and continuously talks are only
the result of a mind which is restless, not sick. She can certainly see that there is
something wrong with her daughter and son, and the fact that they are living on dire
straits does not help her much either.

Furthermore, Amanda
comes from a Southern family with means who taught her the ways of the Southern belles,
and got her accustomed to the finer things in life.

Now she
is a woman living in a small apartment in the city with two grown, ineffectual children,
no money, and abandoned by her husband. She sells magazines to try to make ends meet to
no avail. To top it all, she gets the sad reality check that her daughter, who limps and
has extreme social anxiety, will never have her dream-guy, Jim, as her
beau.

Amanda is sane enough to recognize what is missing in
her life, and in her children's lives. She simply has to bottle it up and pretend that
everything is OK, or that everything will someday be fixed. Far from this being a
positive view of life, it is actually a suppression of reality leading towards denial.
Denial is not something that a person with mental illness is able to feel, because it
takes differentiation and analysis. This is exactly what the family in this play is
experiencing: The sad reality of seeing that their reality is nowhere to where they wish
it were.