‘Gloom and Sadness’: How Abraham Lincoln’s Depression Got Him Elected

Abraham Lincoln is routinely ranked by historians as our greatest president. There have been roughly 16,000 books written about him, including Joshua Wolf Shenk’s Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness. What’s perhaps most interesting about Lincoln’s struggle with depression is how publicly accepted his melancholy was, compared to the stigma associated with depressive states today.