Posted on 10/07/2019 10:07:24 AM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
Lincoln "told Me that he felt like Committing Suicide often," remembered Mentor Graham, a schoolteacher...
Abraham Lincoln fought clinical depression all his life, and if he were alive today, his condition would be treated as a "character issue"that is, as a political liability.
His condition was indeed a character issue: it gave him the tools to save the nation.
With Lincoln we have a man whose depression spurred him, painfully, to examine the core of his soul; whose hard work to stay alive helped him develop crucial skills and capacities, even as his depression lingered hauntingly; and whose inimitable character took great strength from the piercing insights of depression, the creative responses to it, and a spirit of humble determination forged over decades of deep suffering and earnest longing.
"Man is born broken," the playwright Eugene O'Neill wrote. "He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue!" ...Lincoln, too, connected his mental well-being to divine forces.
As a young man he saw how religion could ameliorate life's blows, even as he found the consolation of faith elusive. An infidela dissenter from orthodox Christianityhe resisted popular dogma. But many of history's greatest believers have also been its fiercest doubters. Lincoln charted his own theological course to a living vision of how frail, imperfect mortals could turn their suffering selves to the service of something greater and find solacenot in any personal satisfaction or glory but in dutiful mission.
The griefs of his presidency furthered this humble sense. He lost friends and colleagues to the war, and in February of 1862 he lost his eleven-year-old son, Willie...
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
“I lost one and it changes your psyche and your brain forever.”
It certainly does.
When I visited the Lincoln home in Springfield, the tour guide told us that a friend of Lincoln’s once saw him being chased out of the house by his wife (Mary Todd Lincoln) who was wielding a butcher knife.
His namesake only lived 175 years.
Though sleeping with young union soldiers seemed to cheer him up.
The pseudoscientific claptrap from the shrinks never stops.
Yeah I’m sure Lincoln would have been much better off on SSRIs. Then ha could have just murdered his family and blown his own brains out.
He couldn't legally free them at all. That was a serious break of constitutional law on two points. Direct violation of Article IV, section 2, and a violation of "due process."
If only the tyrant Lincoln had committed suicide early on. It would have saved a lot of lives.
The Civil War would have happened even if Lincoln hadn’t been elected you nit. The slavocracy was committed to blowing up the union. Too bad your mama didn’t encourage you to do the same.
No it didn’t have to happen you idiot. Lots of other presidents would not have started an extremely bloody war to impose US government rule over people who did not consent to it.
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