Lincoln's Melancholy

[L Verge]

(10-12-2016 08:47 AM)RJNorton Wrote:  Excellent points, Rob. I still think Lincoln suffered through periods of extreme sadness and melancholy, but IMO, he was not truly mentally ill or suffering from clinical depression.

On December 23, 1862, Lincoln wrote a letter to the daughter of a friend who had been killed in battle. The girl was suffering with the loss. Part of Lincoln's letter said:

"I am anxious to afford some alleviation of your present distress. Perfect relief is not possible, except with time. You can not now realize that you will ever feel better. Is not this so? And yet it is a mistake. You are sure to be happy again. To know this, which is certainly true, will make you some less miserable now. I have had experience enough to know what I say; and you need only to believe it, to feel better at once. The memory of your dear Father, instead of an agony, will yet be a sad sweet feeling in your heart, of a purer and holier sort than you have known before."

I am a definite layman when it comes to diagnosing mental illness, but in my opinion, Lincoln's words are more likely to have come from a person who suffered through, survived, and recovered from very sad, deep, "hypo" periods in life, not a person who was/had been truly mentally ill or clinically depressed.

Do we have knowledge of how long his "attacks" of melancholy would last? That is often used to distinguish the difference between mentally ill or clinically depressed and the lesser forms of melancholy, I believe. If his spells of depression lasted for months, that would indicate more severe forms to me.