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Mary Todd Lincoln (1818-82), wife of President Abraham Lincoln, was forcibly committed to an asylum, but a contemporary doctor and scholar now believes she wasn't mentally ill at all....
The one thing everyone seems to know about Abraham Lincoln's wife is that she suffered from mental illness. Rumors spread through Civil War era Washington that Mrs. Lincoln was insane, and her reputation for mental instability persists to the present day. But are those rumors even true?
Mary Lincoln suffered from physical and mental health problems during her life. She had frequent migraines, which were exacerbated by a head injury in 1863. She likely suffered with depression; some medical historians think she may have had bipolar disorder.
Today, we might see her erratic behavior as evidence of her possible bipolar disorder or as a sign of the trauma and loneliness she experienced during the chaotic days following her husband’s...
“After her death in 1882, historians—all of them initially male—began to mine her legacy, advancing a questionable theory of lifelong mental illness that remains hotly debated today,” Bloomer...
"When have I ever been so easily bamboozled?" But Dr. John Sotos, a physician and medical historian, says the famously fiery first lady was not only misunderstood - but misdiagnosed. Sotos puts...
By Linda Wheeler. February 14, 2001 at 7:00 p.m. EST. Was Mary Todd Lincoln crazy? During her White House years, she was often portrayed as an unstable woman who made her husband's life...
