Another first cousin of Lincoln's had a daughter committed to the Illinois State Hospital for the Insane. 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. All three of his sons - who bore a strong physical resemblance to their first cousin Abraham - were considered melancholy men. And Mordecai's family was thick with mental disease. 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. Perhaps the most striking evidence of mental trouble in Abraham Lincoln's family comes from his paternal relations.
His behavior was strange enough to make people wonder if Tom Lincoln was losing his mind. 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. "He seemed to me," said his stepgrandson, "to border on the serious - reflective." This seriousness could tip into gloom. Tom Lincoln, a farmer and carpenter, was a social man with a talent for jokes and stories, but he, too, had a somber streak. 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." Nearly all the descriptions of Nancy Lincoln have her as sad. Though our information is imperfect, to say the least, both parents had characteristics suggestive of melancholy. They married in 1806 and had three children: Sarah, born FebruAbraham, born Februand Thomas, born about 1811. His parents, Thomas and Nancy Lincoln, came from Virginia families that crossed the Appalachian Mountains into Kentucky in the late eighteenth century. With Lincoln, such a family history suggests that he came by his depression, at least in part, by old-fashioned inheritance. 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. 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. 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. Some people are more susceptible to depression simply by virtue of being born. To start, the principal factors behind depression are biological predisposition and environmental influences. The perverse benefit of so much suffering is that we know a great deal about what the sufferers have in common. What we can do is describe its general characteristics. 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. Yet Lincoln's 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. It could be used in a psychiatry textbook to illustrate a typical depression. In 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. Read an excerpt from the book's first chapter. It's always this radical gloom that they were shocked by," Shenk says. "When you read the reminiscences of Lincoln's friends and you hear him described in their terms, he's always the most depressed person they've every seen. Robert Siegel talks with Joshua Wolf Shenk, author of Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness. A new book explores how the Illinois lawyer went on to become president despite suffering from lifelong depression. He collapsed, and was treated by a doctor who may have done him more harm than good. In January 1841, a young Abraham Lincoln suffered his second breakdown.
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