Was Lincoln's Depression a Blessing?

[L Verge]

One of our museum volunteers came to work today and handed me a copy of an article that appeared in a church booklet entitled Guideposts in February of this year. The article is entitled "A Sorrow So Deep" and was written by Elizabeth Sherrill. I will excerpt and condense the four pages here:

"It was my grandfather who gave me a lifelong love of Abraham Lincoln, one that was to help me in a way he would never have imagined. As a boy of seven, Grandfather had seen the funeral train carrying Lincoln's body home to Springfield, Illinois. From that moment, sobbing by the tracks, he's taken Lincoln as the model for his own life of battling injustice.

"I was seven when Grandfather gave me my first book about Lincoln..."Abraham Lincoln, The Backwoods Boy"... At eight, I went to a new school. I remember going to its library, much bigger than the one in my old school. [Author then describes seeing color photos of FDR over the librarian's desk, a painting of Washington on one wall and another of Jefferson on the opposite wall. As she turned to leave, she then noticed a black-and-white photo of Lincoln over the door.]...a tall, thin man with his hand on a table and with the saddest, most pain-filled face I'd ever seen.

"...overtime that portrait made him more important to me than ever. Already I was experiencing the bouts of depression that, three years later, would lead my parents to the then-rare step of taking me to a psychiatrist. Despite her help, I continued to have (and still do) occasional descents into those bottomless depths. And at those times, my model continued to be Abraham Lincoln.

"My depression had no discernible cause. His had many [here she describes the various losses of siblings and mother - including a very detailed description of how one dies from white snakeroot poisoning.] That this disadvantaged young man was able to carve out a career for himself as a lawyer seems marvel enough. The fact that he did it while carrying the burden of depression was what astonished me. 'Lincoln was a sad, gloomy man, a man of sorrow,' his longtime friend and law partner said, noting once that 'his melancholy dripped from him as he walked.'"

The author describes his political life as being one of believing he would be defeated, despite his wins. 'How familiar I was with this I've-failed-and-now-it's-hopeless feeling! And yet, as despairing as he felt, Lincoln somehow managed to succeed in every way that mattered."

"By my own late twenties, when my depression became incapacitating, reading about Lincoln's life was a pathway back to the functioning world. Sometimes all I could do was stare at a photograph of his downcast face. Yet in the strange psychology of depression, this cheered me. If Lincoln could accomplish so much while feeling bad, surely I could get up and do a little."

The author then describes being introduced to the word "melancholia" and its 19th- century definition of "fear and sadness without apparent causes." Lincoln certainly had causes throughout his life, culminating in the loss of two children and the horrors of the Civil War. She began to see that Lincoln's medical condition would be recognized today as clinical, or persistent, irrational depression. It has only been within the past fifty years or so that medical researchers have delved into this aspect of Lincoln's life, and Sherrill outlines the study of his family traits of depression, "the Lincoln horrors;" his own conviction that he was constitutionally subject to melancholy, which he dubbed "my peculiar misfortune;" his talk of suicide; and his two breakdowns (mid-20s, the typical age for unset in men, and then in early-30s. "I am now the most miserable man living," he wrote at age 32.

"In an effort to escape his misery, Lincoln underwent the standard medical treatment of the times --a week-long torment that would have included starving, bleeding, dunking in icy water, purging with black pepper drinks, swallowing mercury, applying mustard rubs that burned his skin raw. He emerged emaciated, exhausted and unsurprisingly, feeling worse than ever.

"...if modern drugs and skilled counseling had been available to Lincoln, he might have been a less sad and tormented person. But would he have been so great?

"...Many researchers today, looking afresh at Lincoln's melancholia, are grateful that he was not 'cured.' From his chronic depression may have come the coping skills, the realism, the wisdom that steered the nation through its greatest crisis. What strengths may depression have bestowed on our greatest president?

"The author then lists and gives examples of what she sees as those strengths: HUMOR, HUMILITY, DEDICATION TO A GREAT CAUSE, and DEPENDENCE ON GOD.
'...these are qualities that I think all of us aim at...it was not despite his depression, but because of it, that Lincoln's character developed as it did -- this is the wondrous promise he holds out to people like me."