Pip: History class never mentioned that the second president might have been, by his own secretary of war's assessment, "actually insane" — which is either a scandal or just Tuesday in early American politics.
Mara: Katie D. Arnold pulls that thread in a piece that connects presidential history to lived mental health experience, and it's worth sitting with. Let's start with John Adams, his breakdowns, and what they might mean across generations.
My Ancestor President John Adams and His Mental Health
Pip: The post opens a question that doesn't get asked often enough: what does it look like when someone who shaped a nation was also, by most clinical readings, living with serious mental illness?
Mara: The post draws on historians Ferling and Braverman, and the framing is direct: "Historians have long believed that John Adams was given at times to irrational behavior that could only be attributed to emotional instability." Labels like manic-depressive and slightly paranoid were applied even in his own era.
Pip: And those weren't just retrospective diagnoses — his contemporaries said it plainly, which is the part that lands.
Mara: Benjamin Franklin told Congress that Adams "is always an honest man, often a wise one, but sometimes and in some things absolutely out of his senses." That's a sitting colleague, on record, in session.
Pip: Worth noting the post flags that Franklin, Hamilton, and Jefferson were political rivals — so some of this may be opposition research dressed as clinical observation.
Mara: That caveat matters. Still, the pattern holds across sources. Adams suffered debilitating depression while studying law, spent most of his presidency at his Braintree home drawing sharp criticism, and his own diaries document "anxiety and distress." His grandson and biographer Charles Francis Adams confirmed the breakdowns were real.
Pip: And yet the man served on ninety committees, drafted foundational revolutionary documents, and lived to ninety — which is either an argument for resilience or a very specific kind of stubbornness.
Mara: The post traces a personal line too. The author is descended from Adams through his daughter Abigail Adams Smith, and her mother's family history turns out to carry its own thread of mental illness — which reframes what she had assumed about where her own diagnosis came from.
Pip: The post describes her own diagnosis of severe Bipolar I at seventeen as "a stroke of lightning" — a sudden break from a stable, happy adolescence, attributed to accumulated stress.
Mara: What she takes from the Adams connection is something quieter than vindication — more like context. Knowing the pattern runs through both sides of her family, maternal and paternal, offers a kind of grounding: this was always in the DNA, and likely unavoidable.
Pip: There's something steadying about tracing a diagnosis back through centuries of people who also just kept going.
Mara: It reframes legacy — not just what gets built, but what gets carried. More next time.
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