Adams’ health broke down several times during his life. The first was from recurring attacks of depression in 1756, while studying law. At one point he reported that a ride from Worcester to Shrewsbury left him “weak and aching” . Dr. Nahum Willard (with whom he lodged and boarded) attributed this illness to Adams’ long and close hours of study which had “corrupted his whole mass of blood and juices”.
Historians have long believed that John Adams was given at times to irrational behavior that could only be attributed to emotional instability”. Labels such as “manic-depressive,” “slightly paranoid,” and “a man consumed by an irrepressible urge to master the world” have been applied to Adams. Both he and his mother had quick tempers and labile moods, able to move from the highest spirits to the deepest despondency. Adams could be meek or rash, cautious or explosive.
Ferling and Braverman note that several of Adams’ contemporaries also concluded he was unstable:
- James McHenry (Secretary of War) called Adams “actually insane.”
- Theodore Sedgwick (Senator from Massachusetts) said the President “had his passions” that were derived from a “half-frantic mind.”
- Benjamin Franklin told Congress that Adams “is always an honest man, often a wise one, but sometimes and in some things [he is] absolutely out of his senses.”
- Alexander Hamilton publicly denounced Adams in 1800, claiming that Adams had “certain fixed points of character [that] deprive him of self command and produce very outrageous behavior.”
- Thomas Jefferson quoted rumors circulating in the capital in 1799 that Adams was prone to lose control and given to “dashing and trampling his wig on the floor.”
**It should be noted that several of these men were political rivals of Adams, which may have colored their opinions.
Great success and great misery come with the bipolar life, and the Adamses had their share of both. Adams matriculated at Harvard at age 15. We think of him as a revolutionary firebrand, a diplomat, our nation’s first vice president, and our nation’s second president. But his writings were substantial. Leading up to and during the American Revolution, he wrote the Novanglus (“New Englander” — his pseudonym) Essays, Thoughts on Government, and also drafted the Plan of Treaties. In 1787, he published a massive three volume tome entitled A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America A fourth volume, Discourses on Davila would follow in 1790. He more or less wrote the Massachusetts Constitution. And he was a prolific writer of letters.
By all accounts, Adams was a workaholic. He smoked incessantly. He served on 90 different committees. While not a military commander, he took responsibility for the logistics of the Revolutionary War.
But rumors circulated throughout his career that Adams was mad. His own secretary of war, after resigning, offered that Adams was “actually insane.” Benjamin Franklin noted that Adams “is always an honest man, often a wise one, but sometimes and in some things, absolutely out of his senses.”
There were times when Adams’s responsibilities led to near complete breakdowns. His grandson and biographer, Charles Francis Adams, noted as much.
While studying law, Adams suffered from debilitating depression. While bipolar II brings with it milder episodes of mania, depression can be very deep and prolonged. His diaries tell of “anxiety and distress.” During his presidency, he spent almost all his time at his Braintree, Massachusetts home, Peacefield, for which he drew much criticism. He lived to be 90 years old, a feat not attained by a former president until Herbert Hoover and an age not exceeded until Ronald Reagan.
I am related to John Adams through his daughter Abigail (Adams) Smith, and my mother’s cousin Jana did extensive work on my mother’s family’s genealogy (before the days of DNA kits etc.). It is actually very interesting to find out that my mother’s family tree, including the Adamses, also had a history of mental illness. I had always assumed my father’s side of the family was mainly responsible for my mental illness genes. My father’s mother, my grandmother Annie Joyce Crouch Dietzmann suffered from extreme clinical depression most of her adult life after her mother died suddenly and a car accident involving a young child caused her extreme amounts of stress.
For me my mental health journey can only be described as a stroke of lightning when I was 17 years old. Up until then I had experienced a very normal happy childhood, I did well in school, and I had a large group of friends. Just a typical, average, happy teenager who had always been described in our family as calm, steady, and smart. It was quite the shock to be diagnosed severe Bipolar I after an outpatient stay in a mental hospital. All I can attribute to that time period to was too much stress from too many directions and I cracked under the pressure and my brain has never been the same since. It gives me some comfort to know that this has been in my DNA all along from both sides of my family paternal and maternal and most likely I could have not avoided the diagnosis of Bipolar that has shaped my adult life.
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