Lincoln's Melancholy Summary

Lincoln’s Melancholy was a difficult book to read if one has dealt with mental health issues. The book traverses through Lincoln’s Life, and how depression impacted his personal and professional life. Joshua Wolf Shenk goes through major life events as well as smaller events that defined Lincoln and his depression better than some of his time as president. One such instance is Lincoln is coming home from a long, luxurious vacation and he sees slaves singing and dancing. Lincoln is amazed at the scene and he finds it funny that slaves were happy while he was in an awful depression. He took this as motivation to continue on and not give up even though times got hard. The book also adds a different opinion on depression, instead of looking at …show more content…
The sources range from museums and libraries of national prestige to an article written by Charles S. Zane who knew and worked with Lincoln while he was a lawyer. The bibliography included many essays from the university of Illinois press about Lincolns Humor. The author even included writings that were analyzed his wife Mary and her family’s letters about Lincoln. The author includes quotes from Thoreau’s book Walden. Although the book was about psychology in addition to Lincoln only about one fourth or less of the sources relate to depression or psychology so I can conclude that the Author was more interested in learning about Lincoln than the actual diagnosis and traits of depression. Although there are some decent sources from the psychology standpoint, I am not convinced that Shenk knew what he was talking about in psychological terms. Shenk relies on Sigmund Freud throughout the book who has been largely discredited in the Psychiatric community which leads me to believe that Shenk had little idea what he was talking about in terms of mental illness and the workings of the human brain. Although I believe many would agree that Lincoln displayed symptoms of depression I feel like to diagnose Lincoln as Shenk is trying to do, one must be a professional in the Psychiatric community and even then it would be near impossible to do; considering Lincoln isn’t present to take the psych …show more content…
However I tend to be a difficult critic, especially of works that claim they have a psychological standpoint, so for me the book did not persuade me in any way to believe that Lincoln’s depression is the only thing that made him great or the main thing that made him great. I believe Lincoln was an extremely strong-willed individual and that he may have learned much from struggling with his depression, although I feel like it isn’t fair to Lincoln as an individual to claim this was the main reason he was great, not his hard work or effort but this illness that supposedly let him see things in a more realistic light than others. I also don’t think the book is fair to individuals with depression or mental illness due to the fact that Shenk seems to be saying ‘Look how hard Lincoln had it! You can be great too and if you aren’t then it’s purely your fault!’ I do have to say that the book would have achieved the purpose for a majority of readers if not