Yes, Abraham Lincoln almost certainly suffered from what we now call clinical depression. In his own time, the condition was called “melancholy,” and it was no secret. Friends, colleagues, and neighbors documented his severe depressive episodes in detail, and on at least two occasions people close to him removed knives and razors from his surroundings out of fear he would take his own life.
What Lincoln’s Contemporaries Saw
Lincoln’s depression was visible to nearly everyone around him. When Joshua Speed, who would become his closest friend, first met Lincoln in Springfield, Illinois, he later recalled: “I never saw so gloomy and melancholy a face.” This wasn’t an offhand remark. Multiple people in Lincoln’s life used the word “melancholy” to describe him, and it followed him from his early twenties through his presidency.
A neighbor named Mentor Graham reported that “Lincoln told me that he felt like committing suicide often.” This wasn’t a one-time confession. Lincoln’s suicidal thoughts were persistent enough that friends and neighbors felt compelled to keep watch over him during his worst periods. The depth of his suffering was an open fact among the people who knew him, not something pieced together by historians after the fact.
Two Major Breakdowns
Lincoln experienced two devastating depressive episodes that stand out from his baseline melancholy, one in 1835 and another in 1841.
The first was triggered by the death of Ann Rutledge, a young woman Lincoln was engaged to marry. She fell ill and died in August 1835, when Lincoln was in his mid-twenties. His friend and Ann’s brother later described the aftermath: “The effect upon Mr. Lincoln’s mind was terrible; he became plunged in despair, and many of his friends feared that reason would desert her throne.” Neighbors organized a suicide watch.
The second episode, in January 1841, was even more severe. Lincoln was serving as an Illinois state legislator at the time, his political career threatened by a debt crisis while a brutal winter wore on his already fragile mental state. He had also broken his engagement to Mary Todd, possibly because of his feelings for another woman. His best friend Joshua Speed described it bluntly: “Lincoln went crazy. I had to remove razors from his room, take away all knives and other such dangerous things.” Lincoln himself wrote about his “defective nerves” during this period. It was the second time in six years that the people around him felt they needed to physically prevent him from harming himself.
A Modern Diagnosis
No psychiatrist can formally diagnose someone who died more than 150 years ago, but the historical record maps closely onto what clinicians today would recognize as major depressive disorder. Lincoln had recurrent episodes of profound sadness, persistent suicidal thoughts between episodes, social withdrawal during his worst periods, and a baseline low mood that colored his entire adult life. Modern reviewers of his case have identified at least two clear bouts of major depression, in 1835 and 1841, with chronic depressive symptoms running through the years in between and after.
The Mercury Pills He Took
Lincoln took a common 19th-century medication called “blue mass” for his melancholy. What people at the time didn’t fully understand was that the main ingredient in blue mass was elemental mercury, a potent neurotoxin. Researchers who recreated the original recipe and tested it confirmed that the pills delivered meaningful doses of mercury to whoever took them.
The irony is that the treatment likely made things worse. Mercury poisoning causes irritability, mood instability, and erratic behavior, symptoms that Lincoln’s contemporaries did observe in him during the years he took the medication. Lincoln appears to have been perceptive enough to notice the connection himself. He stopped taking blue mass shortly after his inauguration in 1861, which may have been one of the more consequential personal health decisions in American history.
How Lincoln Managed His Depression
Without access to modern treatment, Lincoln developed his own coping strategies, many of which align with techniques used in therapy today. He wrote extensively about his feelings, channeling his emotional pain into poetry and letters. He leaned on close relationships, particularly his friendship with Joshua Speed, who provided consistent emotional support over decades. During one especially difficult stretch, Lincoln traveled to stay with Speed’s family in Kentucky, deliberately changing his environment.
His famous sense of humor also served a psychological function. Lincoln was known for telling jokes and stories almost compulsively, especially while traveling the legal circuit in Illinois. He surrounded himself with people and built camaraderie through storytelling. These weren’t just personality quirks. They were ways of pulling himself out of isolation and creating moments of relief from a mind that, left to its own devices, tended toward darkness.
Depression and Lincoln’s Leadership
Some historians argue that Lincoln’s lifelong struggle with depression actually shaped the qualities that made him an effective wartime president. His personal suffering gave him an unusual capacity for empathy. He connected with people experiencing hardship because he understood suffering from the inside, not as an abstraction. His ability to persevere through the enormous pressures of the Civil War, the military defeats, the political opposition, the staggering death toll, may have been built on the same resilience he had been developing since his twenties just to get through ordinary life.
Lincoln’s depression didn’t disappear when he reached the White House. The death of his 11-year-old son Willie in 1862 plunged him into grief that observers described in terms familiar from his earlier breakdowns. But by that point in his life, Lincoln had decades of practice enduring psychological pain and continuing to function through it. His presidency is, among other things, a record of what someone with severe, lifelong depression can accomplish when they find ways to carry the weight rather than be crushed by it.