Lincoln's Melancholy

[Gene C]

(10-12-2016 07:47 AM)RJNorton Wrote:  I am a definite layman when it comes to diagnosing mental illness,

I am too, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bc2t6s0XeNk

When Lincoln was a youth, he drove the family nag to the mill, where he tried to encourage her to go at a faster pace. She kicked him in the head, knocking him unconscious for several hours.

Long term effects? Who know? But while we're speculating, it's a thought.

[Rob Wick]

Quote:I would agree on periods of clinical depression, but is clinical depression mental illness? I am not in favor of that term, and I think better and correct would be mental disorder (i. e. acute condition).

The short answer to that is yes. This comes from the website WebMD.

To be diagnosed with clinical depression, you must meet the symptom criteria for major depressive disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), published by the American Psychiatric Association. This manual is used by mental health providers to diagnose mental conditions and by insurance companies to reimburse for treatment.
For clinical depression, you must have five or more of the following symptoms over a two-week period, most of the day, nearly every day. At least one of the symptoms must be either a depressed mood or a loss of interest or pleasure. Signs and symptoms may include:

Depressed mood, such as feeling sad, empty or tearful (in children and teens, depressed mood can appear as constant irritability)

Significantly reduced interest or feeling no pleasure in all or most activities

Significant weight loss when not dieting, weight gain, or decrease or increase in appetite (in children, failure to gain weight as expected)

Insomnia or increased desire to sleep

Either restlessness or slowed behavior that can be observed by others

Fatigue or loss of energy

Feelings of worthlessness, or excessive or inappropriate guilt

Trouble making decisions, or trouble thinking or concentrating

Recurrent thoughts of death or suicide, or a suicide attempt

As I have repeatedly stated, I think Lincoln's mental illness would be best described as a mild form of clinical depression, which is still a major illness. And looking through the list, we have eyewitness accounts on many of these criteria.

Best
Rob

[Gene C]

(10-13-2016 11:44 AM)Rob Wick Wrote:  [quote]
This comes from the website WebMD.

For clinical depression, you must have five or more of the following symptoms over a two-week period, most of the day, nearly every day. Signs and symptoms may include:

Significant weight loss when not dieting, weight gain, or decrease or increase in appetite (in children, failure to gain weight as expected)

Insomnia or increased desire to sleep

Fatigue or loss of energy

Feelings of worthlessness, or excessive or inappropriate guilt

Trouble making decisions, or trouble thinking or concentrating

This is an interesting, serious topic, so to lighten the mood here, and to keep from feeling overly guilty ( that's #1)
I'm getting really hungry - again (that's #2)
So after my nap (that's #3)
I'll have to try again to decide if this applies to me, maybe it does, and maybe it doesn't, what do you think? (that's #4)
And....what were we talking about (still on #4)

Whew!, I'm OK, but it was close there for a while.
Remember to smile -

[L Verge]

(10-13-2016 11:44 AM)Rob Wick Wrote:  

Quote:I would agree on periods of clinical depression, but is clinical depression mental illness? I am not in favor of that term, and I think better and correct would be mental disorder (i. e. acute condition).

The short answer to that is yes. This comes from the website WebMD.

To be diagnosed with clinical depression, you must meet the symptom criteria for major depressive disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), published by the American Psychiatric Association. This manual is used by mental health providers to diagnose mental conditions and by insurance companies to reimburse for treatment.
For clinical depression, you must have five or more of the following symptoms over a two-week period, most of the day, nearly every day. At least one of the symptoms must be either a depressed mood or a loss of interest or pleasure. Signs and symptoms may include:

Depressed mood, such as feeling sad, empty or tearful (in children and teens, depressed mood can appear as constant irritability)

Significantly reduced interest or feeling no pleasure in all or most activities

Significant weight loss when not dieting, weight gain, or decrease or increase in appetite (in children, failure to gain weight as expected)

Insomnia or increased desire to sleep

Either restlessness or slowed behavior that can be observed by others

Fatigue or loss of energy

Feelings of worthlessness, or excessive or inappropriate guilt

Trouble making decisions, or trouble thinking or concentrating

Recurrent thoughts of death or suicide, or a suicide attempt

As I have repeatedly stated, I think Lincoln's mental illness would be best described as a mild form of clinical depression, which is still a major illness. And looking through the list, we have eyewitness accounts on many of these criteria.

Best
Rob

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.

[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."