Lincoln's Inner War

Several years ago I read an article in the Atlantic Monthly that has stayed with me: Lincoln’s Great Depression.

Until I read it, I had no idea that Lincoln had ever struggled with depression, let alone that it had colored and defined his whole life. Minorities of any kind seem to disappear into history - wholesale, like many women and people of color whose outsider status cannot be hidden - or in part, like gay people or religious minorities whose differences can be tucked away, brushed aside. People with mental illness seem to be in that latter group.

Looking at this list of people with major depressive disorder, how many names are you unsurprised to see? I expected only the artists - Kurt Cobain, T.S. Eliot, Vincent Van Gogh. It’s impossible to appreciate their successes without understanding and sympathizing with their depression:

Shape without form, shade without colour, Paralysed force, gesture without motion; Those who have crossed With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom Remember us — if at all — not as lost Violent souls, but only As the hollow men The stuffed men. - T.S. Eliot, the Hollow Men . Come, drowsed in mud soaked in bleach as I want you to be as a trend, as a friend as an old memoria and I swear that I don’t have a gun no I don’t have a gun no I don’t have a gun - Kurt Cobain, Come As You Are

Somehow it’s easier to talk about the pain of depression in song, in poetry, in painting.

No fellow-man shall learn my fate, Or where my ashes lie; Unless by beasts drawn round their bait, Or by the ravens’ cry. Yes! I’ve resolved the deed to do, And this the place to do it: This heart I’ll rush a dagger through Though I in hell should rue it! - Abraham Lincoln, The Suicide’s Soliloquy

Of all the famous people who have suffered from depression, I find Lincoln’s story the most compelling. Here is this man who is frequently considered the best president in American history, who is often credited with saving his country and liberating millions of people, whose face has been carved onto Mount Rushmore and imprinted on the five dollar bill, who is quoted, studied, revered. Few people, depressed or abundantly happy, could hope to live a life of such wide import.

And yet, he was miserable.

“I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth. Whether I shall ever be better I can not tell; I awfully forebode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible; I must die or be better, it appears to me.”

Depression is, more than anything, a deep and pervasive feeling of worthlessness and hopelessness. How is that helped by a society who hides its most successful and laudable sufferers? Who essentially says, “No one with depression is worth talking about, except with pity when they suicide.” Who adds, “No one like you could hope to change the world.”

You don’t have to be president to be a success, to give your life worth and meaning, but it’s so, so important for us to talk about all the ways in which depressed people can and have changed our lives for the better - whether that’s expressing to a depressed friend how much we appreciate their company or teaching schoolchildren, “This man rose from poverty to become the President of the country during its most troubled period. He fought a civil war and won. He signed legislation abolishing slavery. He was beloved.”

“And he was depressed.”