Bio: What depression can teach about Lincoln,and Lincoln about depression

The Mournful Giant
A new book argues that a towering presidency was rooted in terrible gloom.
Reviewed by William Lee Miller
Sunday, October 2, 2005; Page BW03

LINCOLN'S MELANCHOLY
How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness
By Joshua Wolf Shenk
Houghton Mifflin. 350 pp. $25


President Buchanan is reported to have said to President-elect Lincoln as they rode down Pennsylvania Avenue on the latter's Inauguration Day: "My dear sir, if you are as happy on entering the White House as I shall feel on returning to Wheatland , you are a happy man indeed." But Abraham Lincoln did not expect to attain "happiness" in the White House or, as this intellectually energetic book shows, anywhere else. Lincoln's Melancholy sounds again the half-forgotten, minor-key background music of his life. Joshua Wolf Shenk rejects the notion that Lincoln got over his melancholy under the demands of the presidency; his Lincoln is never too busy to be gloomy. And, drawing on modern studies of depression, Shenk even has a reference -- humorous, I think -- to "happiness" as a mental disorder.

In 1998, Shenk (a young essayist who frankly mentions his own battles with depression) read a reference to Lincoln's melancholy in an essay on suicide and set about learning more. In his researcher's zeal, he read Lincoln scholars and also sought them out and interviewed them; he went to Lincoln's birthplace and Ford's Theater, stood where Lincoln delivered the "house divided" speech, held in his hand Lincoln's letters to his friend Joshua Speed, saw the fatal assassin's bullet and, since heredity is one ingredient inclining a person to depression, obtained the records admitting Mary Jane Lincoln, Lincoln's father's cousin, to the Illinois Hospital for the Insane in 1867. He even attended a convention of Lincoln impersonators, borrowed a Lincoln suit for himself and joined in. His book has page after page of acknowledgments, to the point that one may be tempted to say: No wonder a writer with this many friends could produce such a strong book.

"The goal," Shenk writes, "has been to see what we can learn about Lincoln by looking at him through the lens of his melancholy, and to see what we can learn about melancholy by looking at it in light of Lincoln's experience." He has effectively cast light in both directions.

Lincoln's sorrowful moods were no secret; contemporaries said things such as, "His melancholy dripped from him as he walked." But that theme was shoved aside by professional historians in the middle of the 20th century, especially by the towering James G. Randall and his wife, Ruth, who led a generation of scholars to produce ungloomy Lincolns. More recent research, restoring oral testimony taken from Lincoln's own time, has brought back into view two "major depressive episodes" in Lincoln's life, as well as providing a cloud of witnesses to his melancholy disposition....


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/29/AR2005092901714.html

Churchill was clinically depressed as well.

often goes hand in hand with intelligence. You think too much, you know too much, you perceive too much.

That's why I posted this review here at DU, for all us smarties!

The person I was chatting to said depression seems far more prevalent in people with a social conscience, and I think she was right.

The flip side of "Ignorance is bliss." Right up there with "If you're not outraged, you haven't been paying attention." and "He was so bright and had so much going for him, why did he commit suicide?"

I'm going to be thinking about this theory of yours for a while...

Checking on Churchill's "black dog" (his name for the dark moods of depression), I found this quote that lends some credence to your theory: Winston Churchill once said: "Worry is a spasm of the imagination. The mind seizes hold of something and simply cannot let it go."

The more brillliance, the more imagination, the more worry. Ugh.

many years now. It certainly is true that many smart, creative people experience depression.

Happiness is almost a mental disorder. If someone can truly be happy with the way the world is today, there must be something wrong with them. As Janeane say on majority report, they must have some sociopathic inclinations, to care so little about other people and this world.

in my experience, it's not just depression. my schizoaffective episodes and severe worry got worse, coincidentally or not, after i started 'knowing too much'; i often say to my therapist that i kind of wish i wasn't aware of all the things i am, because when you know too much, it means that every choice in life is wrong.

and supposedly i'm pretty high up in brain.

but i could just be nuts! :)

.

It's very good. Deals with the "Black Dog" days excellently.

I'll have to put it on my list. :)

I've always thought this was an interestingtopic. It does not taint or diminish Lincoln in any way. In fact, it makes him more interesting, in a way. A number of presidents seem to have had similar issues.

Angry, petulant, annoyed, or furious, certainly.

Depressed? I just don't see it.

is turned outward, against other people, as petulance and rage.

would be as close as he could come. His make-up is far simpler than that of a Lincoln, an LBJ, or a Nixon. He comes far closer to the inmates at the county jail I used to work with.

Dealing with the Civil War's Blood and carnage and loss day after day after day, his own son's death and his wife's mental state - he wouldn't be human if he wasn't Melancholy. I would say given his situation being depressed would be a sign of mental health. Just look at *'s always being upbeat and cracking jokes while people die everyday in Iraq (never mind Katrina)

I think we are little hysterical about depression sometimes - maybe it goes against our national mythos of can do or what not but people don't take kindly to being being depressed or down - they want them to snap out of it and are willing to pour drugs down folk's throats with a turkey baster if need be. Not that (wimp sounding acknowledgment) clinical depression isn't a serious problem still we have a tendency to treat it as if A) it's the person's own fault and b) they really don't have a reason to be that upset.

... "clinical" depression mostly has chemical and genetic roots. Drugs are not always the answer, but often drugs are part of the answer. Brain chemistry is one of the least understood parts of the human makeup, and while there are serious side effects (for some) to SSRIs, they have proved very effective.

be lost in gray days for the rest of their lives. It's just well, maybe I'm wrong here but the tone of "the Mournful Giant" suggests that the author or the reviewer somehow feel Lincoln's depression was not an appropriate emotional response to what he was going through whereas I feel bearing the burden of the Civil war would get to anybody - hell the emotional and physical toll of being president during the depression and world war II killed FDR, Eisenhower who was never thought of as a deep person emotionally couldn't sleep the eve of D-Day thinking of the men he was ordering to their death, it's only Monkey boy who was able to get a good night's sleep before the invasion of Iraq. Sorry off on a tangent again