Did Abraham Lincoln suffer from a mental illness?
Yes, James, severe depression. On January 23, 1841, he wrote: “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.” Congressman Robert Wilson, who served with Lincoln in the Illinois legislature, wrote this about Abraham Lincoln: “…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.” He thought he was melancholy and a hypochondriac; obviously not. Lincoln’s depressions, whether they lasted for hours, days, weeks, or months always came to
