 |
 |
If you’ve read the book, tell me what you think. With your permission, I may post your comments
with a response. Feel free to talk back about what’s below, too. I
hope this will develop into a rich group discussion. —J.W.S.
of the Sisters of St. Joseph, in Orange, Calif., wrote me: “Joshua. I bought your book Sunday, read it and used your ideas for our third annual awards presentation for people who are (or recently were) homeless and mentally ill. The event was in a large meeting room at St. Joseph that, save for a photo display of sisters, could pass for a hotel conference space. The tables had burgundy tablecloths, white cloth napkins, balloon centerieces — and large dishes filled with new pennies. “The guests were excited about receiving acknowledgement of their accomplishments this year — for things like time sober, finding or keeping a job, moving to permanent housing or reuniting with family. They were pleased for themselves and enthusiastic for each other. When they came in, the pennies aroused quite a bit of curiosity. As I began my presentation, I asked everyone to take a handful of pennies and, whenever I said something they identified with, to set a penny aside.
Miss R., a middle aged black woman who had spent the afternoon getting her best dress ready, took her handful of coins. The expression on her face fluctuated as I told about a person who had suffered from depression, who caused all kinds of worry among friends, who even wondered whether life was worth living. Sometimes she looked like she was in the middle of a sad memory and other times she lit up when she slid a coin into her stack.
“Toward the end, I told them that the person I described was real; in fact, they were holding his image in their hands. I concluded with your insight that Lincoln’s greatness did not lie in triumphing over his suffering, but in integrating it into his life. I don’t think anyone there had illusions about a ‘happily ever after’ cure or change of life. They all worked hard for the achievements of the evening and were aware of what those accomplishments cost. There was a lot of pride that a man like President Lincoln could have experienced, suffered, and grown through the same things they did. It was a wonderful experience of pain in remembering some challenges, satisfaction in identifying with some of the ways Lincoln used to channel his melancholy, and finally pride that they and Lincoln had something in common — not just the pain, but the ability to be more compassionate, more realistic, more human. I wish you could have seen this. Your book is awesome, the response of people who have great challenges was just as awesome. Thank you for your wonderful work.”
Sister Mary Therese, I thank you for your wonderful work, and for sharing it with me.
in The Washington Post, William
Lee Miller warmly praised Lincoln’s Melancholy, calling
it “intellectually energetic” and “a strong book”
that “gain[s] a dimension that not all Lincoln books achieve:
Looking at his subject’s darkness also means approaching his
depth.” Miller wrote near the end:
“‘Depressive realists’ like Shenk (and Lincoln) would
expect there to be a touch of the negative in a review, so I provide
the following: First, sometimes this almost seems to be a
pro-depression book; second, sometimes Lincoln’s depression seems to
be presented as the sole source of his greatness; and third, some
readers, coming across page after page about gloom, misery,
melancholy and depression, will say, ‘Enough already.’
“Shenk argues that the suffering that Lincoln ‘endured lent
him clarity, discipline, and faith in hard times.’ But surely
suffering does not do all that unless there is something strong that
the suffering prods into action. Lots of people suffer; not all of
them become great. I would suggest that Lincoln had intellectual and
moral self-confidence, deep conscientiousness, a powerful desire to
achieve something worthy, a romantic idea of his country and an
unusual sympathy for creatures in distress — all independent of his
being depressed.”
I do appreciate these bracing criticisms. I don’t intend to be
pro-depression — regret if the book seems so — but to honestly
examine its realities, including the plague of its coming, the burden
of surviving and enduring it, and the chance for growth in the face
of it. I wonder if the word “plagued” may have helped. I
proposed to use it in the subtitle, instead of “challenged” (a timid, pale word, I think, next to the bright horror of depression).
I also didn’t intend to suggest an exclusive or causal role for
depression. Clearly, Lincoln had innate
strengths, and clearly his experience of depression was just one
aspect of a complex character. I don’t think we profit from splitting
off any one factor — and, indeed, this is where the 19th century
conception of melancholy bests our modern conception of depression.
“Melancholy” is broad enough to encompass — or at least to
overlap with — tender romanticism, deep empathy, and stirring
ambition. I say, forget about finding a single
factor that “caused” Lincoln, or “created” him.
Look for the windows that allow us to see him in his breadth, and
depth. That’s what I claim for the depression — not that it was the
whole of him, but that seeing it helps us see him.
to propose that Lincoln suffered traumatic brain injury (TBI), given that he was kicked in the head by a horse in his youth. “As a TBI myself,” she writes, “I see all of the same activities and moods in myself and in the TBI patients I saw as an RN working in an inpatient Rehab unit for seven years.” Though burdened with difficulty in organizational thinking, she writes, she and others with TBI “find our imaginations seemed to have been increased... Most of the TBI survivors I have met through tbi.org feel urges to write or in some other ways express themselves in art.”
Thanks Sandra. I think it’s a matter of speculation whether Lincoln in fact suffered such a brain injury. That said, the horse-kick incident belongs in the review of significant details about Lincoln’s youth, as it relates to his later depression. Indeed, I’m struck, re-reading the relevant passage from Herndon’s Lincoln, that this discussion not only raises the question of early brain injury, but also casts some light on Lincoln’s understanding of biology and psychology. Here’s the passage:
From Herndon’s Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life , by William H. Herndon and Jesse W. Weik (1888). In later years Mr. Lincoln related the following reminiscence of his experience as a miller in Indiana: One day, taking a bag of corn, he mounted the old flea-bitten gray mare and rode leisurely to Gordon’s mill. Arriving somewhat late, his turn did not come till almost sundown. In obedience to the custom requiring each man to furnish his own power he hitched the old mare to the arm, and as the animal moved round, the machinery responded with equal speed. Abe was mounted on the arm, and at frequent intervals made use of his whip to urge the animal on to better speed. With a careless “Get up, you old hussy,” he applied the lash at each revolution of the arm. In the midst of the exclamation, or just as half of it had escaped through his teeth, the old jade, resenting the continued use of the goad, elevated her shoeless hoof and striking the young engineer in the forehead, sent him sprawling to the earth. Miller Gordon hurried in, picked up the bleeding, senseless boy, whom he took for dead, and at once sent for his father. Old Thomas Lincoln came ... -59-
loaded the lifeless boy in a wagon and drove home. Abe lay unconscious all night, but towards break of day the attendants noticed signs of returning consciousness. The blood beginning to flow normally, his tongue struggled to loosen itself, his frame jerked for an instant, and he awoke, blurting out the words “you old hussy,” or the latter half of the sentence interrupted by the mare’s heel at the mill.
Mr. Lincoln considered this one of the remarkable incidents of his life. He often referred to it, and we had many discussions in our law office over the psychological phenomena involved in the operation. Without expressing my own views I may say that his idea was that the latter half of the expression, “Get up, you old hussy,” was cut off by a suspension of the normal flow of his mental energy, and that as soon as life’s forces returned he unconsciously ended the sentence; or, as he in a plainer figure put it: “Just before I struck the old mare my will through the mind had set the muscles of my tongue to utter the expression, and when her heels came in contact with my head the whole thing stopped half-cocked, as it were, and was only fired off when mental energy or force returned.” -60-
me to draw attention
to the characteristics in Lincoln’s cousin, Mordecai Lincoln, that
are consistent with bipolar disorder. “Persons with recurrent
unipolar depression,” Ghaemi writes, “who have a first degree
relative with bipolar disorder may actually have some variety of the
bipolar spectrum, rather than pure unipolar depression. In fact, the
original distinction between bipolar and unipolar depression was
based mainly on genetic studies that suggested that the two run
separately. Thus, the bipolar relative (and likely relatives) in
Lincoln’s family should raise our suspicion that Lincoln himself
either had hypomanic periods that are difficult to document, or
perhaps experienced a variety of depression that might biologically
be similar to bipolar disorder.”
I appreciate Dr. Ghaemi’s point. Given that Lincoln had no obvious
full-blown mania, I focused more on his low moods than on any mood
swings. But I’d like to hear from other readers on this subject
— especially clinicians and patients who have experience with
hypomania.
|
