Lincoln's Melancholy

[RJNorton]

(10-13-2016 01:55 PM)L Verge Wrote:  In our age of understanding genetics and also chemical analysis, I think it should be pointed out that our DNA can pre-dispose us to clinical depression. It does run in families (I belong to such a family), much like pre-dispositions to addictions, and can also be triggered by changes in one's bodily chemicals. I doubt that we would ever find this mentioned in a Lincoln biography.

This is one of Shenk's arguments in Lincoln's Melancholy. He writes:

The standard way to investigate biological predisposition is simply to list the cases of mental illness -- or mental characteristics suggestive of potential illness -- in a family. With Lincoln, such a family history suggests that he came by his depression, at least in part, by old-fashioned inheritance. His parents, Thomas and Nancy Lincoln, came from Virginia families that crossed the Appalachian Mountains into Kentucky in the late eighteenth century. They married in 1806 and had three children: Sarah, born February 10, 1807; Abraham, born February 12, 1809; and Thomas, born about 1811. Though our information is imperfect, to say the least, both parents had characteristics suggestive of melancholy. Nearly all the descriptions of Nancy Lincoln have her as sad. For example, her cousin John Hanks said her nature "was kindness, mildness, tenderness, sadness." And Lincoln himself described his mother as "intellectual, sensitive and somewhat sad." Tom Lincoln, a farmer and carpenter, was a social man with a talent for jokes and stories, but he, too, had a somber streak. "He seemed to me," said his stepgrandson, "to border on the serious -- reflective." This seriousness could tip into gloom. According to a neighbor in Kentucky, he "often got the ‘blues,' and had some strange sort of spells, and wanted to be alone all he could when he had them." During these spells he would spend as much as half a day alone in the fields or the woods. His behavior was strange enough to make people wonder if Tom Lincoln was losing his mind.

Perhaps the most striking evidence of mental trouble in Abraham Lincoln's family comes from his paternal relations. His great-uncle once told a court of law that he had "a deranged mind." His uncle Mordecai Lincoln had broad mood swings, which were probably intensified by his heavy drinking. And Mordecai's family was thick with mental disease. All three of his sons -- who bore a strong physical resemblance to their first cousin Abraham -- were considered melancholy men. One settler who knew both the future president and his cousins spoke of the two "Lincoln characteristics": "their moody spells and great sense of humor." One of these Lincoln cousins swung wildly between melancholia and mania and at times had a tenuous grip on reality, writing letters and notes that suggest madness. Another first cousin of Lincoln's had a daughter committed to the Illinois State Hospital for the Insane. After a trial, a jury in Hancock County committed thirty-nine-year-old Mary Jane Lincoln to the hospital, noting that "her disease is of thirteen years duration." At the hospital, an attendant observed, "Her father was cousin to Abraham Lincoln, and she has features much like his."

What is striking about the case of Mary Jane Lincoln is that the jury, charged with answering the question of whether insanity ran in her family, concluded that "the disease is with her hereditary." According to a family historian who grew up in the late nineteenth century, the descendants of Mordecai Lincoln "suffered from all the nervous disorders known. Some were on the ragged edge." One family member who had frequent spells of intense mental trouble referred to his condition as "the Lincoln horrors."

Three elements of Lincoln's history -- the deep, pervasive sadness of his mother, the strange spells of his father, and the striking presence of mental illness in the family of his uncle and cousins -- suggest the likelihood of a biological predisposition toward depression. "Predisposition" means an increased risk of developing an illness. As opposed to traditional Mendelian inheritance -- in which one dominant gene or two recessive genes lead to an illness or trait -- genetic factors in psychiatric illnesses are additive and not categorical. "The genes confer only susceptibility in many cases," explains the psychiatrist S. Nassir Ghaemi, in The Concepts of Psychiatry, "not the illness. That is, they only increase the likelihood that fewer or less severe environmental factors are required for the illness to develop, compared with someone who has fewer disease-related genes."