Andy Warhol Was a Hoarder (16 page)

All true. But the key feature of the condition is that depressive episodes come and go, like an ocean wave that crashes with intensity then recedes into foamy calm. It does not plague people every minute of every day. “There's not a single piece of commentary in one thousand years of description of depression that says it does,” says Tufts's Ghaemi. “It's much briefer, it's episodic.” Depression does not have to be incapacitating to qualify as depression, he says, and mild to moderate cases “are fully consistent with being a productive person.” Even somebody who burrows under the covers and closes the shades during a severe depressive episode can be fully functional weeks later, performing surgery, giving TED talks, writing literary and musical masterpieces. Goethe, Schumann, Luther, and Tolstoy all battled depression, and yet their accomplishments are legendary. “Some people suffer mild depression and are totally disabled by it; others suffer severe depression and make something of their lives anyway,” writes Andrew Solomon, who experienced a breakdown during the final stages of writing
The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
, his National Book Award winner. He managed to finish it anyway.

Anthony Storr, a 20th-century British psychiatrist, described recurrent depression as a “spur,” propelling people to achieve great
acts even in their more dire states because they are desperate to escape the morass of despondency. Lincoln's experience is consistent with this observation. In a letter, he advised his friend Joshua Speed to “avoid being idle” and “engage in some business” at times of despair. Winston Churchill was also a dark man driven to action. Churchill referred to his own depression as his “black dog.” It was a constant companion, so overwhelming at times that he worried he might succumb to it completely. “I don't like standing near the edge of a platform when an express train is passing through. I like to stand right back and if possible to get a pillar between me and the train,” he told his physician. “I don't like to stand by the side of a ship and look down into the water. A second's action would end everything. A few drops of desperation.”

Storr believed it was Churchill's own experience with depression that afforded him the conviction to stand firm during the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940, as the Germans incessantly attacked England's Royal Air Force. Any rational leader might have concluded that the end was near, Storr wrote in his book
Churchill's Black Dog
. “Only a man who knew what it was to discern a gleam of hope in a hopeless situation, whose courage was beyond reason, and whose aggressive spirit burned at its fiercest when he was hemmed in and surrounded by enemies, could have given emotional reality to the words of defiance which rallied and sustained us in the menacing summer of 1940,” he continued. “Churchill was such a man: and it was because, all his life, he had conducted a battle with his own despair that he could convey to others that despair can be overcome.”

Could being depressed, as Storr seems to argue, make you a better leader? Nassir Ghaemi thinks so. In his book
A First-Rate Madness
, Ghaemi argues that depression and other mood disorders infused such leaders as Churchill, Gandhi, and Martin Luther
King, Jr., with positive attributes, including empathy, creativity, resilience, and realism—all of which inspired exceptional leadership during times of crisis. Indeed, the notion of “depressive realism,” dating back to the late 1970s, has launched a whole branch of science, which argues that depressed people view the world more realistically than their more upbeat peers who may be irrationally optimistic. In Lincoln's case, Ghaemi says, the president's levelheadedness allowed him to advocate for ending slavery without alienating opponents, and to face the Civil War with full appreciation of its worst outcomes in a way that was more perceptive than many of his advisers. “Lincoln was not overly optimistic,” Ghaemi says, “and did not assume a win would be easy.”

The notion that depression comes with positive attributes is controversial, given the severity of the illness and the risk of suicide. But a host of depression memoirs confirm that many people who suffer terribly also say they value the magnitude of emotional depth they experience. In the last paragraph of his book, Solomon concludes that his depression has allowed him to discover his soul—“a part of myself I could never have imagined,” until “hell came to pay me a surprise visit. It's a precious discovery.”

Evidence shows that depression and even joy can coexist without negating each other. Indeed, it is not at all unusual for two dueling qualities to create a kind of psychological oxymoron in the same person. Great performers suffer from stage fright. Doctors have horrible hypochondria. Pulitzer Prize winners battle self-doubt. There may be no better example of this than Robin Williams, the funny man who made the world laugh while suffering a cancerous misery inside. “Lincoln is only one example of a person whose enormous vitality, effectiveness, humor, empathy—all these characteristics we associate with the best of human existence—run hand in hand with terrific pain,” says Shenk.

The notion that depression is inextricably linked to positive qualities raises intriguing questions about whether combating the condition with medication will dampen the soul while lessening the despair. Psychotherapy, along with lifestyle changes like regular exercise, can alleviate depression. But antidepressants are rampant in today's fix-me-fast society, with one in ten Americans now taking them. Some are mildly affected but want to take the edge off daily stress and turmoil. In severe cases, the medications can help significantly, especially in combination with psychotherapy. Many clinicians argue that the real problem is undertreating people who need help but never seek it.

It's impossible to know if Lincoln would have benefited from Prozac, or if treating him might have quelled the deep qualities—sensitivity, empathy, insight—that contributed to his greatness. It's also hard not to wonder. A cartoon published in the
New Yorker
several years ago depicted this question with the kind of humor Lincoln might have enjoyed. Titled “If they had had Prozac in the nineteenth century,” it featured images of Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Edgar Allan Poe. Marx declares, “Sure, capitalism can work out its kinks!” Nietzsche says, “Me too, Mom. I really liked what the priest said about all the little people.” Poe, looking at a black raven, chirps, “Hello, birdie!”

A
PRIL 14, 1865,
G
OOD
F
RIDAY
, was a cool, gray day in Washington, D.C. That afternoon, the president and Mary Lincoln went for a ride in their open carriage past the Capitol to the Navy Yard, where Lincoln wanted to see the warships. Navy officers and sailors saluted, and although the war was not yet over, the president told his wife that he considered it ended. “During the drive he was so
gay,” Mary Lincoln later recalled, “that I said to him, laughingly, ‘Dear husband, you almost startle me by your great cheerfulness.' ”

A few hours later, the Lincolns set out for Ford's Theatre to see the British farce
Our American Cousin
. Clara Harris, a New York senator's daughter whom Mary Lincoln had invited to accompany them, remembered the president's happy mood, too. “He laughed & joked & he was evidently bent on having a jolly evening.” Upon their arrival, the audience applauded and the orchestra played “Hail to the Chief.” At around ten p.m., an actor took to the stage with a laugh line. And then—the unthinkable. John Wilkes Booth opened the state box door, took aim, and shot President Abraham Lincoln in the head. “Awful Event,” the
New York Times
headline read the next day. “President Lincoln Shot by an Assassin.”

One week later, a train carrying Lincoln's coffin departed from Washington, D.C., bound for Springfield, Illinois, the president's final resting place. Young Willie's coffin was also on board, exhumed from its plot in the capital so that he could be buried next to his father. Over the course of its 1,600-mile journey, “The Lincoln Special” traveled through seven states and almost 200 cities, where grieving citizens wept and paid tribute to their righteous president.

“Not often in the story of mankind does a man arrive on earth who is both steel and velvet, who is as hard as rock and soft as drifting fog, who holds in his heart and mind the paradox of terrible storm and peace unspeakable and perfect,” the writer and Lincoln biographer Carl Sandburg said on the 150th anniversary of Lincoln's birth in 1959. The young farm boy from Kentucky, the storyteller, the jokester, the strategist, the deeply loving father, the president of exceptional character. Steel and velvet, melancholy and mirth.

I
T WAS
M
AY
1, 1950, a rainy day in New York harbor, when 23-year-old George William Jorgensen, Jr., embarked on the ocean liner
Stockholm
with a few hundred dollars and a one-way ticket to Copenhagen. Before the ship set sail on its ten-day journey, George celebrated with family and friends in his stateroom. They serenaded the young adventurer with a round of the old Norse drinking toast, “Skoal!” They talked about the relatives he should visit—George's grandparents had emigrated from Denmark to the United States in the late 1800s—the places he might see, the photographs he would take.

George played along enthusiastically, indulging requests to deliver personal greetings and reassuring everyone that he'd be a good European tourist. “Yes, I'll write often,” he told them. “No, I didn't make a return reservation, because I don't know how long my money will last. Yes, I'll remember. No, I won't forget.”

On the surface, the atmosphere was lighthearted and anticipatory, but George was harboring a secret more momentous than anyone could have imagined. He was not heading to Denmark to discover his family roots, eat pickled herring, and visit the famed Rosenborg Castle with its Dutch Renaissance architecture. George Jorgensen, a former Army private first class, was going to Europe to transform himself into a woman.

George set sail that May day sporting short hair and a man's overcoat. Almost three years later, after undergoing hormonal treatment and sex-reassignment surgery, Jorgensen returned to the United States with a new look, a new gender, and a new name: Christine. George was quiet and unassuming; Christine became an instant media sensation. The
New York Daily News
had been tipped off about Jorgensen's transition and published a scoop in advance of her arrival, which set off a flurry of additional stories and a hunger for more. When she arrived at New York International Airport wearing lipstick and a fur coat with matching cap, Jorgensen was greeted by a throng of shoving journalists—a scene that was “more like a battlefield,” she would later recall, “with flash-bulbs popping, photographers shouting instructions, and reporters lobbing questions from the firing line.” Sweating under the blinding lights, Jorgensen was rattled by the onslaught of queries: “Where did you get the fur coat?” “Do you expect to marry?” “How about a cheesecake shot, Christine?”

At a time of prudish sexual mores and widespread sexism in 1950s America, Jorgensen's stunning metamorphosis was front-page
news, with headlines reading “Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty” and “Bronx ‘Boy' Is Now a Girl.” Journalists tracked her every move, including how she tossed off a Bloody Mary and teetered in her heels. Some even accused her of being a fake. Americans were shocked, intrigued, and confounded all at once. How could a man become a woman? And why would he want to? Over the next months and years, Jorgensen's case would shake up rigid assumptions about the immutable nature of gender, precipitate a debate over its definition, and become one of the most transformative developments in the history of sex in America and the world.

Today, Jorgensen would be diagnosed with gender dysphoria, a condition characterized by a “marked incongruence” between the gender somebody is deemed at birth and the gender he or she identifies with and yearns to be. Untangling the coiled intersection of body and mind is an important goal of scientists in every field of medicine and psychology; nowhere is that crossroads more pronounced than in the fraught world of sex and gender. Was George Jorgensen's body wired to be a woman from birth, as predetermined as long eyelashes or a throaty laugh? Or was he suffering from a mental health problem that needed to be fixed? Christine Jorgensen had plenty to say about both.