Word: shenk
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...sense is that Lincoln came to understand that he had a condition that was somehow organically connected to his constitution—something he was born with that was not going away,” says Shenk...
Lincoln’s contemporaries, Shenk says, saw melancholy as a temperamental style, as part of someone’s character. Those afflicted by melancholy might have been more prone to nervous states or debilitating disease. But melancholy was part of a spectrum...
...Ultimately, Shenk just wrote another book about the Lincoln legend. To his credit, Shenk does bring modern psychological knowledge to bear on our understanding of the sixteenth president...
That said, Shenk believes that Lincoln’s depression cannot be separated from his personality, and that the modern tendency to see depression as distinctly separate from ordinary mental states isn’t accurate...
...Shenk says that even if readers see Lincoln’s contemporaries’ views on mental illness as inferior to modern psychology, “it makes you think that these things are in flux, that our relationship to depression is a relationship of ideas. We’re developing and thinking about these things, and they can shift over time...