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Turning depression into wisdom: What Lincoln can teach contemporary college students
(Revised and expanded from an address by Gary Pavela at Virginia Tech University, July 13, 2007)
Most of our focus in this symposium has been on a horrific act of violence by a student with a mental disorder. We know, of course, that the connection between mental illness and violence is tenuous --insufficient to draw firm conclusions about the future behavior of any particular student, especially if there has been no related pattern of substance abuse or past violence. Still, our discussions about mental illness have focused on the potential for destruction. I propose to explore an instance when successful adaptation to a mental disorder added depth and wisdom to life.
In one of the documents distributed today I posed a question to which you already know the answer:
Please consider the following profile of a troubled young adult, based on an actual case history:
- Talked about suicide for weeks at a time.
- Reportedly wrote poetry about thrusting a dagger in his heart and "draw[ing] blood in showers!"
- Was known to "go crazy," requiring the removal of knives and dangerous items from his room.
- Purchased opiates and cocaine.
- Wandered around with a gun during periods of suicidal ideation.
- Collapsed while speaking openly of his hopelessness and thoughts of suicide.
- Was eventually diagnosed with "recurrent major depression."
Who was this risk to himself and to society?
The answer is Abraham Lincoln. My primary source is Joshua Wolf Shenk's award winning book Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness (2006) and, secondarily, the analysis of William Lee Miller, author of Lincoln's Virtues, (2002 ); Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (2006) and Carl Sandburg, The Prairie Years and the War Years, V.3 (1960).
Lincoln's iconic status can be an impediment to educators. Students are rightly skeptical about what they can learn from god-like figures immortalized in granite. Recent scholarship, however, has opened a new window on Lincoln as a person--his emotional intelligence, and his adaptive skills in coping with adversity, failure, loss, and depression. These are precisely the qualities that need emphasis in the present generation. They're also qualities best understood in the context of a life story, even if the surface of the story is as well known as that of Abraham Lincoln.
There's little doubt Lincoln faced a recurring battle with clinical depression. A letter he wrote in 1841 reveals the depth of the condition:
For not giving you a general summary of news, you must pardon me; it is not in my power to do so. I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth. Whether I shall ever be better I can not tell; I awfully forebode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible; I must die or be better, it appears to me. The matter you speak of on my account, you may attend to as you say, unless you shall hear of my condition forbidding it. I say this, because I fear I shall be unable to attend to any bussiness [sic] here, and a change of scene might help me. If I could be myself, I would rather remain at home with Judge Logan. I can write no more. Your friend, as ever---
A. LINCOLN
A fellow legislator in Illinois (Robert L. Wilson) saw the extent of Lincoln's "melancholy" in 1836:
In a conversation with him about that time (1836), he told me that although he appeared to enjoy life rapturously, still he was the victim of terrible melancholy. He sought company, and indulged in fun and hilarity without restraint, or stint as to time. Still when by himself, he told me that he was so overcome with mental depression, that he never dare carry a knife in his pocket. As long as I was intimately acquainted with him, previous to the commencement of the practice of the law, he never carried a pocket knife, still he was not a misanthropic. He was kind and tender in his treatment to others.
Multiple observers have referred to a "mental health crisis" on college campuses. Whether or not such a crisis exists, students have much to gain by studying the adaptive strategies of a person who turned a mood disorder into a source of strength and wisdom for himself and the nation.
How did Lincoln do it?
[1] Learning to learn from suffering.
Lincoln had the courage to go to the core of his suffering and seek a solution. That solution entailed defining and pursuing a high calling. Shenk and biographer Ward H. Lamon cite the following statement Lincoln reportedly made to his friend Joshua Speed (the quotation is from Lamon's Life of Abraham Lincoln):
[H]e told Speed, referring probably to his inclination to commit suicide, 'that he had done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived, and to connect his name with the events transpiring in his day and generation and so impress himself upon them as to link his name with something that would redound to the interest of his fellow man was what he desired to life for.' [H]e [later] reminded Speed [of this conversation] at the time. . . he issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
The current generation of college students seems especially interested in education as an instrumental means to "making a good living." One of our duties as educators is to ask probing questions designed to help them and ourselves define a good life. Likewise, it may not be possible or desirable to root out the sometimes problematical inclination to "link [our] names" with something important (an impulse typically turned to destructive ends in the school shooting phenomenon). That's a quality of human nature found in varying degrees in every culture and individual. It remains in everyone's interest, however, to help young people--especially those most anxious to garner respect from their peers--to understand that lasting respect comes not out of adolescent images of power or machismo, but the accomplishment of something that "redound[s] to the interest of [their ] fellow man." Harvard University psychiatrist George Vaillant made a similar point in starker terms when he wrote that the therapist's (and educator's) goal is not to find and advance perfect specimens (if such beings exist), but to "help the paranoid's projection become a novel, an eccentric's sexual fantasy become a sculpture, and a delinquent's impulse to murder evolve into creative lawmaking . . . " (Adaptation to Life, 1977).
[2] Defining a goal.
Deciding to pursue a "high calling" requires particularity. What, precisely, is the aim? The answer in Lincoln's case was the fundamental principle of human equality set forth in the Declaration of Independence. This is what he said in a February 22, 1861 "unprepared speech" in Independence Hall, Philadelphia:
[A]ll the political sentiments I entertain have been drawn, so far as I have been able to draw them, from the sentiments which originated, and were given to the world from this hall in which we stand. I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence . . . I have often inquired of myself, what great principle or idea it was that kept this Confederacy so long together. It was not the mere matter of the separation of the colonies from the mother land; but something in that Declaration giving liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but hope to the world for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance. This is the sentiment embodied in that Declaration of Independence.
Now, my friends, can this country be saved upon that basis? If it can, I will consider myself one of the happiest men in the world if I can help to save it. If it can't be saved upon that principle, it will be truly awful. But, if this country cannot be saved without giving up that principle---I was about to say I would rather be assassinated on this spot than to surrender it.
The danger of not defining fundamental goals is captured by the expression: "having lost sight of our objective we redoubled our efforts." In truth, people who skate on the surface of life soon tire of extraordinary effort. One of the primary aims of a liberal education is to help students define objectives --if only as working hypotheses-- that will inspire commitment to a cause greater than themselves. It is when they "forget themselves" in such a cause that the destructive pain of self-absorption subsides.
[3] Thinking about thinking.
Joshua Wolf Shenk discussed Lincoln's reference in the First Inaugural to "the better angels of our nature." Those words came from a man who appreciated the competing and contradictory claims of the human psyche. But there are other examples in Lincoln's political writing reflecting the insight that learning how to think could be essential to survival. In an 1862 message to Congress Lincoln wrote that:
The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise -- with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.
What Lincoln saw as essential to national survival was also a quality he used to save himself. Psychologists and psychiatrists refer in this regard to the strengthening of a "higher" or "observer" self, able to step back from and evaluate the immediate flow of emotion. It's a quality captured in a December 1974 interview by Sam Keen with Italian psychiatrist Roberto Assagioli :
I believe the will is the Cinderella of modern psychology, It has been relegated to the kitchen. The Victorian notion that will power could overcome all obstacles was destroyed by Freud's discovery of unconscious motivation. But, unfortunately, this led modern psychology into a deterministic view of man as a bundle of competing forces with no centre. This is contrary to every human being's direct experience of himself. At some point, perhaps in a crisis when danger threatens, an awakening occurs in which the individual discovers his will. . . With the certainty that one has a will comes the realization of the intimate connection between the will and the self . . . It is self-consciousness that sets man apart from animals. Human beings are aware but also know that they are aware." [emphasis added]
This insight led to Assagioli's wonderful aphorism: "I have emotions, but I am not my emotions."
We published a case study of a college student suicide (drawing upon notebook marginalia the victim left behind) in our book Questions and Answers on College Student Suicide (2006). The student showed heartbreaking evidence he was beginning to use, but had not yet developed the potential of the "observer self":
"Can I ever teach? Will I ever cure stuttering? Job interviews, phone calls. People notice or am I blowing this out of proportion?" [emphasis supplied].
It's commonplace in higher education to speak of teaching students "how to think." This is not an aim to be attempted lightly. It should be one of our highest priorities--a phenomenon that must be continuously studied, evaluated, and revitalized. The goal goes beyond career preparation. For human beings, thinking about thinking is necessary to life itself.
[4] Nurturing a love of learning.
People who knew Lincoln well referred to him as a "stubborn reader." William Lee Miller provides this description:
It would be quite a study to go through the available record to identify all the places, times, and postures in which those who had known Lincoln in Indiana and in New Salem remembered him reading a book: reading while the horse rests at the end of a row, reading while walking down the street, reading under a tree, reading while others went to dances, reading with his legs up as high as his head, reading between customers in the post office, reading snatched at length on the counter of the store.
There may be many reasons why Lincoln loved reading. For all his outward gregariousness he was a profoundly solitary man, rarely revealing himself to others. Reading was an antidote to loneliness and a way for a precocious mind to find worthy companionship. Lincoln's love of reading also had much to do with a relentless drive for self-improvement--especially after he had defined a higher goal for his life. It's disorienting in comparison to contemporary political leadership to discover that Lincoln regarded one of his greatest personal accomplishments during his time in Congress as "study[ing] and nearly master[ing] the six books of Euclid."
Troubled college students sometimes make the mistake of regarding reading, studying, and learning as stressful diversions from their inner turmoil. The opposite is true. Few pursuits are more conducive to mental health than a determined and disciplined focus on better understanding and appreciating the "outside" world. A mind focused exclusively on itself is wandering in barren terrain.
[5] Blending friendship, solitude, and empathy.
Joshua Wolf Shenk cited a letter Lincoln wrote to his best friend Joshua Speed in 1842, shortly after Speed was married. Lincoln was 33 years old at the time:
How miserably things seem to be arranged in this world. If we have no friends, we have no pleasure, and if we have them we are sure to lose them, and be doubly pained by the loss . . . I feel somewhat jealous of both of you now [Speed and his wife]; you will be so exclusively concerned with one another, that I shall be forgotten entirely.
Reading that wonderfully needy letter and visiting the Lincoln Memorial several hours later--as I recently did--is a disconcerting experience. Lincoln as a human being and Lincoln portrayed in a monument (modeled on the Temple of Zeus in Olympia, Greece) evoke two distinctly different feelings. The former better suits our educational aims.
Lincoln's bond with Joshua Speed was exceptional. The depth of the relationship may be associated with Lincoln's need for companionship during a time of personal doubt and turmoil. But, as suggested earlier, Lincoln also found solace in solitude, especially as he grew older. Shenk wrote:
Lincoln did little to cultivate intimacy with his wife, or with any other person. His colleagues on the [law] circuit, though they liked and admired him, also felt an impassible distance from him. The one relationship that had obviously transcended business, with Joshua Speed, was by the late 1840s clearly a thing of the past.
Why did the relationship with Speed wane? One answer --suggested by Shenk and other scholars--is that Speed eventually became a slaveholder. As much as Lincoln valued Speed's friendship, he valued the sentiments in the Declaration of Independence more.
One quality in Lincoln that never seemed to diminish was a capacity for empathy. It was evident in his youth (evidenced by multiple stories of his rescuing animals in distress) and could be seen in his conscious effort to see and understand the perspectives of those which whom he disagreed.
Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote that:
Unusual among antislavery orators in the 1850s, Lincoln sought to comprehend the Southerners' position through empathy rather than castigate slave owners as corrupt and un-Christian men. He argued, 'They are just what we would be in their situation. If slavery did not now exist amongst them, they would not introduce it. If it did now exist amongst us, we should not instantly give it up.' It was useless, he explained in another address, to employ 'thundering tones of anathema and denunciation,' for denunciation would be met by denunciation, 'anathema with anathema.'
Far better, he believed, to reach into the heart of one's opponents--which, of course, he memorably did in his second Inaugural . . .
The capacity for empathy also helped Lincoln moderate his own faults. Kearns wrote:
To be sure, there were times when Lincoln lost his temper, but then he would promptly follow up with a kind gesture. 'I was a little cross,' he wrote one of his generals, 'I ask pardon. If I do get up a little temper I have no sufficient time to keep it up.' By such gestures, repeated again and again, he repaired injured feelings that might have escalated into lasting animosity.
What insights can we explore with students about these complex characteristics in Lincoln's life? One answer is that simplistic bromides in self-help manuals fail to capture the complexity of the human heart. Love and friendship are essential to happiness (as Lincoln felt intensely), but exhorting someone with Lincoln's personality to turn away from solitude would be to try to divert him from a central source of comfort and strength. Lincoln balanced his capacity for friendship with deep intellectual interests and overriding social commitments. All three gave meaning to his life. Finding that balance was probably easier because Lincoln could also feel and express love through the quality of empathy, generously shared.
[6] Maintaining humility in the face of mystery.
No one can begin to learn from Lincoln's life and personality without understanding his humility about ultimate knowledge. At a more superficial level, in terms of recognizing his own intellectual powers, Lincoln was far from humble. In this context his "rail splitter" image has the feel of being an artifice--an amusing deception he probably enjoyed. But on deeper matters of religion and faith he genuinely seemed to suspend judgment. Man could not know. And for all man does know every event in life was determined long ago. An approving crowd may have admired the religious tone in Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, but it was religion of a different sort than many of them heard in church:
Each [side in the war] looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes (emphasis supplied).
Lincoln's God was distant and impenetrable. Yet each person remains morally responsible. At one level this perspective is confusing and frightening. At another it's reassuring. We have a duty to do our best. Peace comes with the lucid awareness that any final judgment about whether we have failed our succeeded will be made by a power greater than our own. The Universe is not ours to manage--and we should be eternally thankful it isn't.
[7] Refocusing the mind: the role of work and humor.
A consistent theme in Lincoln's life is his deliberate management of mental focus. This is a form of cognitive therapy before the term was invented. Shenk and biographer Ward H. Lamon cited an example in an 1842 letter from Lincoln to Speed:
I think if I were you, in case my mind were not exactly right, I would avoid being idle. I would immediately engage in some business, or go to making preparations for it.
More useful practical advice would be hard to find. Again, the fundamental understanding (contrary to Freudian perspectives) is that the mind turned "outward" to worthy pursuits is likely to shape a more desirable, bearable, and sustainable interior landscape.
Lincoln also used humor as a diversion. Carl Sandburg quoted one contemporary observer who didn't understand this dynamic (and who must have been blind to the melancholy on Lincoln's face) as saying "[c]an this man Lincoln ever be serious?"
There were times when Lincoln's humor was simply good-natured fun. Sandburg told the story of "[a] newly elected Congressman [who] came in, [and] Lincoln knowing him to have a sense of humor, [said] 'Come in here and tell me what you know. It won't take long.'" On other occasions Lincoln's humor had a more pointed edge. The following example comes, again, from Sandburg:
[Lincoln asked General McClellan why heavy gun emplacements were located north of Washington]. McClellan replied: 'Why, Mr. President, if under any circumstances, however fortuitous, the enemy, by any chance or freak, should in the last resort get behind Washington in his efforts to capture the city, why, there is the fort to defend it.' The precaution, said the President, reminded him of a lyceum [public hall] in Springfield. 'The question [up for debate] was, 'Why does man have breasts?' and after long debate was submitted to the presiding judge who wisely decided 'that under any circumstances, however fortuitous, or by any chance or freak, no matter what he nature or by what the cause, a man should have a baby, there would be the breasts to nurse it.'
Sandburg and most other Lincoln scholars saw Lincoln's humor for what a was: a wise and practiced form of diversion. This final example from Sandburg highlights that insight:
On the day after [the lost battle at] Fredericksburg the staunch old friend, Issac N. Arnold, entered Lincoln's office and was asked to sit down. Lincoln then read [a joke from a book by the humorist] Artemus Ward. . . That Lincoln should wish to read this nonsense while the ambulances were yet hauling thousands of wounded from the frozen mud flats of the Rappahannock River was amazing to Congressman Arnold. As he said afterward he was 'shocked.' He inquired, 'Mr. President, is it possible that with the whole land bowed in sorrow and covered with a pall in the presence of yesterday's fearful reverse, you can indulge in such levity?' Then, Arnold said, the President threw down the Artemus Ward book, tears streamed down his cheeks, his physical frame quivered as he burst forth, 'Mr. Arnold, if I could not get momentary respite from the crushing burden I am constantly carrying, my heart would break!' And with that pent-up cry let out, it came over Arnold that the laughter of Lincoln at times was a mask.
[8] Learning from failure. Widespread in popular literature is the "Lincoln's Failures" list. One version includes the following examples:
- 1832 defeated for state legislature
- 1833 failed in business
- 1836 nervous breakdown
- 1843 defeated for nomination to Congress
- 1849 rejected for land officer
- 1854 defeated for U.S. Senate
- 1856 defeated in run for nomination for Vice-President
- 1858 defeated for Senate again
- 1860 elected President of the United States
These lists are deficient because they fail to mention corresponding successes. Nonetheless, any two or three such failures might be sufficient to derail a career or a life. Lincoln persisted. He persisted, in part, because he defined a higher goal beyond his own success or failure. With that goal in mind he became a practitioner of "wise failure." Each defeat, properly understood, provided knowledge and experience for subsequent success.
Contemporary students often lack skills in adapting to and learning from failure. For some the first B- in college represents the end of all hope. How can educators help? The best place to start is with candid discussion of our personal experiences in learning how to fail wisely. Ken Bain makes this point in his book What the Best College Teachers Do (2004):
Highly effective teachers tend to reflect a strong trust in students . . .They often display openness with students and may, from time to time, talk about their own intellectual journey, its ambitions, triumphs, frustrations, and failures, and encourage their students to be similarly reflective and candid. They may discuss how they developed their interests, the major obstacles they faced in mastering the subject, or some of their secrets for learning particular material. They often discuss openly and enthusiastically their own sense of awe and curiosity about life. Above all, they tend to treat students with what can only be called simple decency (emphasis supplied).
A concluding suggestion
Two years ago, in a Time Magazine article, Barack Obama provided a wonderful short summary of the message Lincoln's life can convey:
What I marvel at, what gives me such hope, is that this man could overcome depression, self-doubt and the constraints of biography and not only act decisively but retain his humanity. Like a figure from the Old Testament, he wandered the earth, making mistakes, loving his family but causing them pain, despairing over the course of events, trying to divine God's will. He did not know how things would turn out, but he did his best.
We learn better from example than by precept. For many students, Lincoln's skillful adaptations to a mental disorder are hiding in plain sight. Educators can bring those skills alive by discussion, elaboration, and reiteration, or simply by joining students in reading a suitable book (e.g. Shenck's Lincoln's Melancholy). Doing so would also convey an important underlying message: Students with mental disabilities can be part of the creative diversity colleges seek to promote. The first step toward fulfilling that goal, especially after the horrific events on this campus three months ago, is to refuse to be guided by our fears.
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