Drawing on seven years of his own research and the work of otheresteemed Lincoln scholars, Shenk reveals how the sixteenthpresident harnessed his depression to fuel his astonishing success.Lincoln found the solace and tactics he needed to deal with the nation"sworst crisis in the "coping strategies" he had developed over a lifetimeof persevering through depressive episodes and personal tragedies. With empathy and authority gained from his own experience withdepression, Shenk crafts a nuanced, revelatory account of Lincoln andhis legacy. Based on careful, intrepid research, Lincoln"s Melancholyunveils a wholly new perspective on how our greatest presidentbrought America through its greatest turmoil. Shenk relates Lincoln"s symptoms, including mood swings andat least two major breakdowns, and offers compelling evidence of theevolution of his disease, from "major depression" in his twenties andthirties to "chronic depression" later on. Shenkreveals the treatmentsLincoln endured and his efforts to come to terms with his melancholy, including a poem he published on suicide and

CHAPTER 1 The Community Said He Was CrazyIn three key criteria -the factors that produce depression, the symptoms of what psychiatrists call major depression, and the typical age of onset-the case of Abraham Lincoln is perfect. It could be used in a psychiatry textbook to illustrate a typical depression. Yet Lincolns case is perfect, too, in a very different sense: it forces us to reckon with the limits of diagnostic categories and raises fundamental questions about the nature of illness and health. Though great resources in research and clinical science have been devoted to depression in the past few decades, we can neither cure it nor fully explain it.What we can do is describe its general characteristics. The perverse benefit of so much suffering is that we know a great deal about what the sufferers have in common. To start, the principal factors behind depression are biological predisposition and environmental influences. Some people are more susceptible to depression simply by virtue of being born. Depression and other mood disorders run in families, not only because of what happens in those families, but because of the genetic material families share. A person who has one parent or sibling with major depression is one and a half to three times more likely than the general population to experience it. 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 Lincolns family comes from his paternal relations. H

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Excerpted from Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness by Joshua Wolf Shenk
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