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Overcoming Challenges in Life: How Abraham Lincoln Defeated Depression

When you think you are alone in your struggles and no one has ever been there before here is a story of overcoming challenges in life

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Recognized as one of our country’s greatest presidents, Abraham Lincoln is well known for his impressive accomplishments, including preserving the union during the Civil War and signing The Emancipation Proclamation into law to end slavery.

He is less known for his ability to overcome a significant and ever-present obstacle in his life—clinical depression.

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Lincoln’s humble beginnings—famously born in a small log cabin—also included a history of depression. Both his parents, Thomas and Nancy Lincoln, are believed to have also suffered from it.

Though there are many factors related to it, researchers say that a vulnerability to depression can be inherited, which may have been the case with Lincoln.

By studying Lincoln’s own letters and the observations of his friends and associates, historians have concluded that Lincoln battled with chronic depression for much of his life. In fact, it wasn’t something Lincoln hid from his friends or the public.

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He had spells that his friends described as “melancholy,” sometimes spoke of suicide and described the world as “hard and grim.”

In 1841, Lincoln sought a doctor’s help for his depression. It isn’t known what type of treatment he received, but he later told his law partner, “I am now the most miserable man living… Whether I shall ever be better I cannot tell; I awfully forebode I shall not.”

Fortunately for Lincoln and the country, he learned to defeat depression and he maintained a healthy attitude about it. “A tendency to melancholy….,” he wrote in a letter to a friend, “let it be observed, is a misfortune, not a fault.”

As is the case with many who strive to overcome major difficulties in life, Lincoln’s struggles with depression may have made him a better man and even played a role in his success.

Below are some of the coping methods Lincoln employed to defeat his own depression, and they can still be effective today:

Finding a Purpose

focusing on a higher purpose gave him a reason to live even when he felt as if we wanted to die. “Adhere to your purpose,” Lincoln wrote to Quintin Campbell in 1862, “and you will soon feel as well as you ever did.”

Lincoln’s goal to end slavery and preserve the union eventually became his central goal and purpose. Lincoln defeated depression by focusing intently on this goal.

Applying Humor

Telling funny stories and making jokes seemed to give him relief from his sadness. Lincoln said, “If it were not for these stories—jokes, jests, I should die; they give vent—are the vents of my moods and gloom.” His humor could be good-natured or more pointed.

Robin Williams, who battled severe depression and recently took his own life. Like Lincoln, Williams, too, found solace in humor. “Every time you get depressed,” he said in an interview with the Guardian in 1996, “comedy will be there to drag [you] out of it.”

Finding Joy

Lincoln had a love of learning and reading, which he used as a distraction from his melancholy. He especially loved Shakespeare and poetry. Though Lincoln had very little formal education, he always enjoyed reading and was said to have walked miles to borrow a book.

Cultivating Humility and Faith

Lincoln is one of many public figures who are now believed to have battled mental disorders, including Charles Dickens and Leo Tolstoy (depression), Ludwig Von Beethoven, Winston Churchill, and Vincent van Gogh (bipolar disorder), and Michelangelo

Despite attaining the country’s highest office, Abraham Lincoln had a sense of humility and did not have a problem with ego. He was open to learn from others and even appointed former adversaries to positions on his cabinet.

His humility allowed him to accept his own failures and not be threatened by the success of others.

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