An extremely interesting article on Lincoln and depression

[pegkerr]

From the Atlantic, a few years ago:

Abraham Lincoln fought clinical depression all his life, and if he were alive today, his condition would be treated as a "character issue"—that is, as a political liability. His condition was indeed a character issue: it gave him the tools to save the nation.

The article concludes:

Many popular philosophies propose that suffering can be beaten simply, quickly, and clearly. Popular biographies often express the same view. Many writers, faced with the unhappiness of a heroic figure, make sure to find some crucible in which that bad feeling is melted into something new. "Biographies tend conventionally to be structured as crisis-and-recovery narratives," the critic Louis Menand writes, "in which the subject undergoes a period of disillusionment or adversity, and then has a 'breakthrough' or arrives at a 'turning point' before going on to achieve whatever sort of greatness obtains." Lincoln's melancholy doesn't lend itself to such a narrative. No point exists after which the melancholy dissolved—not in January of 1841; not during his middle age; and not at his political resurgence, beginning in 1854. Whatever greatness Lincoln achieved cannot be explained as a triumph over personal suffering. Rather, it must be accounted an outgrowth of the same system that produced that suffering. This is a story not of transformation but of integration. Lincoln didn't do great work because he solved the problem of his melancholy; the problem of his melancholy was all the more fuel for the fire of his great work. [Emphasis added]

Extremely interesting and well worth reading.

Comments

[elements]

This is interesting, and I like it. I've had this impression that it's considered OK or even necessary for people in the arts to have some form of depression, but not in "serious" fields like politics. I do expect that today he'd have had to keep it well hidden, or more likely that he'd have self-selected out of politics knowing how brutal it would be to someone with depression. I know I personally did that - I had been doing a lot of political work, but for one the schedules in this era are crushing if you need any kind of personal time to center yourself and stay sane, or if you can't get by on chronic low sleep, and then I didn't want to have to constantly be worried about hiding parts of my life or how they'd impact me or the people I was working for.

I saw Stephen Fry speak recently, and I hadn't realized he's got manic depression/bipolar and made a documentary about it. It was nice to see someone who, while in the arts, is quite well respected and loved, and while given some allowances for eccentricities not primarily thought of as an oddball because of mental illness.