Review of Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness

Book Link: https://smile.amazon.com/Lincolns-Melancholy-Depression-Challenged-President-ebook/dp/B0085TK3CS

Since Abraham Lincoln is typically revered as one of the greatest presidents in United States history, I was intrigued by a book that instead wanted to focus on his depression and challenges throughout his life. I was suprised by the level of detail and specificity the author could get into on his life before the presidency and learning more about his struggles and challenges was a great insight into parallels in my own life and those close to me. I'm very happy that depression and mental health conversations are becoming more normalized and understood in modern times and I'm especially happy to this story retroactively highlighting it in significant figures in history. While the details sometimes felt like they dragged on or were not entirely necessary, the content of the narrative was clear and powerful. I would definitely recommend this to anyone on a mental health journey regardless of where you find your in the journey today. It was also a nice refresher on historical events and timelines for me :-)

Some highlights from my reading: 1. From a young age, Lincoln experienced psychological pain and distress, to the point that he believed himself temperamentally inclined to suffer to an unusual degree. He learned how to articulate his suffering, find succor, endure, and adapt. Finally, he forged meaning from his affliction so that it became not merely an obstacle to overcome, but a factor in his good life. 2. Many studies have linked adult mental health to parental support in childhood. Lower levels of support correlate with increased levels of depressive symptoms, among other health problems, in adulthood. 3. “It’s not the large things that send a man to the madhouse,” Charles Bukowski has written. “No, it’s the continuing series of small tragedies . . . a shoelace that snaps, with no time left.” 4. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 1837, “We are embarrassed with second thoughts; we cannot enjoy any thing for hankering to know whereof the pleasure consists . . . The time is infected with Hamlet’s unhappiness,—‘Sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.’” But Emerson urged that this was only a symptom of a profound opportunity. “I look upon the discontent of the literary class, as a mere announcement of the fact, that they find themselves not in the state of mind of their fathers, and regret the coming state as untried; as a boy dreads the water before he has learned that he can swim.” 5. “Words are forgotten,” he said, “misunderstood—passed by—not noticed in a private conversation—but once put your words in writing and they stand as a living and eternal monument against you. 6. psychiatrist Victor Frankl described the essence of what has come to be known as an existential approach to the human condition with this metaphor: “If architects want to strengthen a decrepit arch,” he wrote, “they increase the load which is laid upon it, for thereby the parts are joined more firmly together.” It is similarly true, he said, that therapy aimed at fostering mental health often should lay increased weight on a patient, creating what he described as “a sound amount of tension through a reorientation toward the meaning of one’s own life.” 7. “It does not depend on the start a man gets,” Logan answered him. “It depends on how he keeps up his labors and efforts until middle life.” Lincoln liked that advice, and he came to fulfill it, not only in his intellectual and material labors, but in his philosophical and emotional ones as well. 8. Andrew Delbanco goes so far as to define culture as a collective psychological notion. “Human beings need to organize the inchoate sensations amid which we pass our days—pain, desire, pleasure, fear—into a story,” Delbanco writes. “When that story leads somewhere and thereby helps us navigate through life to its inevitable terminus in death, it gives us hope. And if such a sustaining narrative establishes itself over time in the minds of a substantial number of people, we call it culture.” 9. It is a signal feature of depression that, in times of trouble, sensible ideas, memories of good times, and optimism for the future all recede into blackness. 10. H. L. Mencken joked that Puritanism was “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, maybe happy.” 11. “The death scenes of those we love,” he wrote, “are surely painful enough; but these we are prepared to, and expect to see. They happen to all, and all know they must happen.” 12. One crucial distinction between major depression and chronic depression is that, in the latter, one largely ceases to howl in protest that the world is hard or painful. Rather, one becomes accustomed to it, expecting such hardship and greeting it with, at best, a stoic determination. 13. The psychologist Hagop S. Akiskal, who has written widely on the condition, notes that chronic depressives “seem to derive personal gratification from over-dedication to professions that require greater service and suffering on behalf of other people.” Many chronic depressives say that they feel empty in every realm except their work. Akiskal proposes that two factors might lead to such a “mono-categorical existence.” Depressives might withdraw from social pursuits until work is all that’s left, or work might be a compensatory response—an asset that is conscientiously developed and protected. 14. While many people feel a letdown after a success or an achievement, research on chronic depression shows that for dysthymics, the letdowns can be more severe. What looks to the world like a triumph, many depressed people see as merely another step on an unending ladder. In extreme cases, a dramatic achievement can create as strong a sense of dislocation and loneliness as would a dramatic setback, and may lead to suicide. 15. To whatever extent Lincoln used medicines, his essential view of melancholy discounted the possibility of transformation by an external agent. He believed that his suffering proceeded inexorably from his constitution, that it was his lot to bear. “You flaxen men with broad faces are born with cheer, and don’t know a cloud from a star,” he once said to a visitor at the White House. “I am of another temperament.” 16. Lincoln saw the world as a deeply flawed, even tragic, place where imperfect people had to make the best of poor materials. At his worst, the burdens of this vision pressed him into ruts and troughs. At his best, it fueled a passion for redemption. 17. Yet as this research suggests, one cognitive symptom of depression may be the loss of optimistic, self-enhancing biases that normally protect healthy people against assaults to their self-esteem. In many instances, depressives may simply be judging themselves and the world much more accurately than non-depressed people, and finding it not a pretty place.” 18. Whatever greatness Lincoln achieved cannot be explained as a triumph over personal suffering. Rather, it must be accounted for as an outgrowth of the same system that produced that suffering. This is not a story of transformation but one 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. 19. Good leaders can navigate skillfully between a steady set of principles and the exigencies of the moment. 20. The psychiatrist George Vaillant has shown that the bedrock of character comes not by good fortune but by how people deal with problems. 21. Humor, as we’ve seen, allows a person to fully engage with reality while enjoying its absurdities. Healthy people also practice suppression, which, quite unlike denial, is the selective, forceful act of pushing away oppressive stimuli; anticipation, which involves dealing with the moment in part by looking ahead to the good and the bad that lie in the future; altruism, or placing the welfare of others above oneself; and sublimation, which involves channeling passions into art. 22. No matter what happened now, he told his colleagues, the struggle had been joined. No one could turn back from it. “Fellow-citizens,” he said, “we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.” The test of this generation of Americans, Lincoln said, was whether they would “nobly save, or meanly lose, the last, best hope of earth.” 23. Lincoln died as he had lived, a dramatic illustration of how suffering can be bound up with greatness. His story endures in large part because he sank so deeply into that suffering and came away with increased humility and determination.