Andy Warhol Was a Hoarder (15 page)

Much has been made of Lincoln's marriage and the impact it had on his mental health. He eventually did marry Mary Todd, on November 4, 1842, and the couple settled into a cottage in Springfield. Over the next 11 years, they produced four sons: Robert, Edward (Eddie), William (Willie), and Thomas (Tad). The two were not completely mismatched—they shared a love of poetry and humor, and Mary Lincoln supported her husband's political ambitions. Correspondence between them, written in the late 1840s while Lincoln was living in Washington serving a term in Congress and Mary and the children were at home in Illinois, shows affection and a desire to be together. But emotional volatility plagued their union much of the time. Mary had a hot temper (the president's White House secretaries nicknamed her the “Hellcat”), suffered from intense mood swings, and was famous for her outlandish behavior, especially her exorbitant buying sprees. (She once acquired 84 pairs of kid gloves in less than a month.) The mental health of Mary Lincoln, whose eldest son helped commit her to a mental institution ten years after her husband's death, has been itself the subject of great debate. Did she suffer from schizophrenia? Bipolar disorder? Or was she the victim of unspeakable grief after witnessing her husband's assassination and the deaths of three of her four sons?

Lincoln had his own challenges as a husband. Unable to handle his wife's tempestuous fits, he often chose to ignore her and leave the house rather than sort out what was wrong. And his tendency to veer into dark places and disappear into a solitary funk greatly upset his wife. She found his moodiness “profound and troubling,” according to biographer Daniel Mark Epstein. “He could be—especially in company, at the dinner table where he had an
audience—full of high spirits, his eyes twinkling, taking as much pleasure in telling his jokes and yarns as in hearing her laughter,” Epstein observes in
The Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage
. “But he could sink into fits of melancholy that could drain the light from a room. More often, it was his silence that worried or exasperated her. He sat staring into space as if he were dead or time traveling—who knew?—in a trance or catatonic state. She could not reach him though he sat within a few feet of her.”

The tragic deaths of their children affected the Lincolns individually and, most certainly, as a couple. In 1850, three-year-old Eddie died, probably from tuberculosis. Willie, who was most like his father in personality, succumbed to typhoid fever at the age of 11 in 1862, during Lincoln's second year in the White House. The “idolized” child in the family, as Mary described him, Willie brought particular joy to the president with his intelligence and bright spirit. Mary took to her bed, inconsolable. Willie's death brought the president to his knees. Elizabeth Keckley, a former slave who worked as Mary's assistant and dressmaker, said Lincoln's body “convulsed with emotion” when he saw his son's body. “I never saw a man so bowed down with grief.” (The couple's youngest son, Tad, died at 18—probably from pneumonia—six years after Lincoln was assassinated.)

As president, Lincoln's personal traumas were compounded by the horrific battles and losses of the Civil War. After the governor of Pennsylvania described a battlefield slaughter to Lincoln, the president “groaned, wrung his hands and showed great agony of spirit,” Lincoln scholar Michael Burlingame writes in his biography
The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln
. A War Department telegraph operator who had taken messages from Lincoln during that battle reported, “When it was learned that over 13,000 men were killed, the calamity seemed to crush Lincoln. He looked pale,
wan and haggard. He did not get over it for a long time—and, all that winter of 1863, he was downcast and depressed. He felt that the loss was his fault.” Following a Union defeat in the summer of 1864, Lincoln said, “I was as nearly as inconsolable as I could be and live.”

Over the course of his life, Lincoln sought relief through various treatments. He was believed to have taken “blue mass,” a mix of mercury and several other ingredients. Today, the pills would be considered highly toxic, but they were commonly prescribed in Lincoln's day to treat a variety of health problems, including toothaches, constipation, and melancholia. The president found his most comforting refuge in words, stories, and humor. He loved poetry and Shakespeare's dramas, which he would read late into the night. His gift for oration and the passion with which he delivered his tales delighted his audience and lifted his spirits. “If the day was long and he was oppressed, the feeling was soon relieved by the narration of a story,” said a judge who knew him. “His countenance and all his features seemed to take part in the performance. As he neared the pith or point of the joke or story every vestige of seriousness disappeared from his face. His little gray eyes sparkled; a smile seemed to gather up, curtain like, the corners of his mouth; his frame quivered with suppressed excitement; and when the point—or ‘nub' of the story, as he called it—came, no one's laugh was heartier than his.”

Laughter was Lincoln's trusted antidote, healing his anguish with light. His humor was “as natural as his melancholy,” Tarbell wrote. “It bubbled up through things like one of those warm springs that one sometimes comes upon in a rugged, rocky field.” Medical studies now confirm that humor can reduce stress, cut pain, and lighten one's mood. Lincoln seemed to know this instinctively. He told Herndon, his law partner, that “if it were not for these
stories—jokes—jests I should die: they give vent—are the vents of my moods & gloom.”

D
ESPITE THE ENORMITY OF DEPRESSION
—the illness affects at least one in ten Americans and is the leading cause of disability worldwide—researchers still don't fully understand what causes it. It is clear that mood disorders run deep through family lineage. Twin studies show that if one twin suffers from depression, the other is at a significantly higher risk of developing the illness as well; if your parent or sibling has depression, your chance of developing it is two to three times greater than average. “Risk” is the critical word here. You inherit certain physical characteristics from your mother and father—for example, curly hair, brown eyes, attached or unattached earlobes. The development of mental health conditions depends on a far more complex mix of genes, life circumstances, and environment. While the DNA passed on by your parents may increase your susceptibility to depression, there's no certainty that you'll actually develop it.

The mental health history of Lincoln's family is impossible to fully determine, but his parents were said to be somewhat doleful. Descriptions of Lincoln's mother very often referred to her as “sad,” a word Lincoln used about her himself. His father, known to be a storyteller and jokester, also had a “somber streak,” Shenk notes, and would routinely suffer glum periods, spending hours alone in the fields or the woods. A neighbor said he “often got the blues.” Lincoln's paternal uncle, Mordecai, had mood swings, and his three sons all exhibited depressive characteristics. The daughter of another cousin was committed to the Illinois State Hospital for the Insane. “His melancholy was stamped on him while in the
period of gestation,” a fellow lawyer said about Lincoln. “It was part of his nature.”

“Stamped on him” is an elegant and prescient description of what we know now about the power of DNA and its role in transmitting predispositions for illness from one generation to the next. It also speaks to the discoveries being made today about the impact of environmental factors in a mother's womb on her growing fetus. Research suggests that a baby developing in an anxious or depressed woman may be exposed to stress levels and hormones that alter its brain development, possibly making it more susceptible to later mental health conditions. After birth, other influences may push a person who is genetically vulnerable to depression over the edge. A turbulent early childhood involving sexual or physical abuse and emotional neglect appears to be especially consequential. So does the death of a parent when a child is young.

Lincoln's mother, Nancy, died quickly, within a week of contracting milk sickness. Decades later, Lincoln told a friend how lonely he felt after she died. Burlingame, the Lincoln scholar, describes Nancy's death as “the most important cause of Lincoln's depression.” Lincoln also had an unhappy and distant relationship with his father, who was known to be cold and harsh. Thomas Lincoln, who never learned to read, had little tolerance for his son's keen enthusiasm for books. A cousin reported that he would sometimes “slash” or whip Abe when he caught him reading instead of doing chores or working in the fields. After his wife's death, Thomas left ten-year-old Abe and his older sister Sarah, then 12, alone for months while he traveled to Kentucky to bring back a new wife. Upon their return, Lincoln's stepmother, Sarah Bush Johnston, found the children “wild—ragged and dirty.” Years later, Lincoln declined to visit his father on his deathbed and did not attend his funeral in 1851. His father's lack of support and
empathy “may have hurt as much as the sudden shock of his mother's death,” Burlingame writes.

These early traumas likely laid the groundwork for depression in Lincoln—and it is possible that the emotionally wrenching events he suffered as an adult activated memories of prior loss. What's intriguing is the way in which depression changes the brain over time. Studies have found that the hippocampus, the brain's hub for learning and memory, shrinks in patients who have had multiple episodes of depression, making them more susceptible to a lifelong struggle. Among people who experience one bout of depression, more than half will suffer another in their lifetime. Every episode increases the risk of an additional occurrence—by the time you have three, your chances of having a fourth are 90 percent. Scientists call this the “kindling” effect; the brain is waiting and ready to catch fire.

First episodes are often triggered by a specific life experience, as appears to have been the case with Lincoln. But later ones may strike simply because a person's brain has been primed to feel down. Plenty of people get divorced, lose their jobs, and care for sick parents, but most do not become clinically depressed as a result; instead, they become lonely, angry, frustrated, and sad. They move on. People with major depression, on the other hand, are wired for despondency. Even when life seems to be chugging along fairly well, minor mishaps will touch off symptoms, which sometimes seem to strike like sudden turbulence on a smooth airplane flight.

At its worst, depression is a debilitating, suffocating, and isolating experience. The novelist William Styron described the anguish he suffered as a “veritable howling tempest in the brain.” In his memoir
Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness
, Styron said he felt that his brain was under siege and that his thoughts “were being engulfed by a toxic and unnameable tide that obliterated
any enjoyable response to the living world.” Depression saps every ounce of joy, every morsel of optimism. “It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul,” Styron wrote. “So the decision-making of daily life involves not, as in normal affairs, shifting from one annoying situation to another less annoying—or from discomfort to relative comfort, or from boredom to activity—but moving from pain to pain. One does not abandon, even briefly, one's bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes.”

Over the centuries, the concept of depression has undergone enormous transformation. Early on, it was thought that people who experienced sadness and negative thinking were possessed by some external demonic force that required excision. Hippocrates and the ancient Greeks believed that mental problems were the result of an imbalance of four bodily fluids, or humors: blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. Melancholia was linked to an excess of black bile, which had to be purged from the body through bloodletting. Early Christianity viewed depression as punishment for temptation by the devil and the depravity of sin. Great thinkers of the Renaissance, on the other hand, saw an upside to depression as a possible catalyst for genius, fueling literary and artistic creation. By the time Lincoln was born in the early 19th century, a distinction had been made between melancholia, which was defined as all-encompassing despair, and the melancholic temperament, which made people gloomy but also imbued them with sensitivity and keen analytic reasoning.

Although Lincoln clearly experienced depressive episodes, not everybody agrees that he had full-blown clinical depression. One of the greatest sticking points revolves around the balance between Lincoln's moods and his accomplishments. How does a man suffering from depression preside over a country in strife, write the Gettysburg Address, quash slavery, and still seem to retain a rich sense
of humor and even gaiety at times? Depression and productivity do seem an unlikely match. Skeptics assert that Lincoln could not have succeeded as president and been chronically depressed at the same time. “It is impossible to reconcile this debilitating disease with the Lincoln who labored tirelessly and effectively during his demanding presidency,” Harold Holzer, a leading Lincoln scholar, has written. Without treatment, Holzer argues, many depressed people who lived during Lincoln's era went mad or committed suicide: “Clinically depressed people often can't get out of bed, let alone command an army.”