Historians and psychiatric researchers suggest Theodore Roosevelt exhibited traits consistent with bipolar disorder, characterized by manic energy, intense focus, and depressive episodes. While he was never officially diagnosed in his lifetime, his family had a strong history of mental illness, and his relentless drive was partly a coping mechanism for profound grief.
Key Details of Roosevelt’s Mental Health:
- Grief and Depression: Roosevelt famously battled intense depression after his mother and his wife, Alice, died on the exact same day in 1884. He coped by throwing himself into the “strenuous life,” moving to the Dakota Territory to work as a cattle rancher. He believed constant physical motion and activity kept his darker mental demons at bay.
- Family History: The Roosevelt family carried a significant psychiatric burden. His mother Martha showed signs of mental instability, his brother Elliott struggled with severe substance abuse and bipolar disorder, and his son Kermit, as well as several other descendants, suffered from deep depression and ultimately died by suicide.
- Research and Diagnoses: A 2006 study published in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease speculated that, due to his immense shifts between high sociability, intense energy, and episodes of despair, Roosevelt may have lived with bipolar disorder. However, as discussed in communities like Reddit’s BipolarReddit, many experts and historians warn against applying modern clinical diagnoses to historical figures.
Theodore Roosevelt’s dedication to the wilderness was deeply tied to his mental health. Facing severe asthma as a child and debilitating grief as a young man, he used nature as a sanctuary to soothe emotional and psychological anguish. This reliance on the outdoors directly inspired his historic conservation legacy.
Roosevelt’s relationship with mental health and the environment can be broken down into three key areas:
1. Coping with Grief and “Neurasthenia”
- The West Cure: As a young man, Roosevelt suffered from debilitating asthma and “neurasthenia,” a condition doctors attributed to the stresses of modern, industrial life. The prescribed treatment for men at the time was to go out West to reinvigorate the mind and body.
- Tragedy and the Badlands: In 1884, Roosevelt’s mother and wife died on the exact same day. To process his profound heartbreak, he retreated to the Dakota Badlands to work as a cattle rancher. He later wrote that nature was essential for overcoming depression, stating: “Black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough.”
2. The Birth of the National Parks
Roosevelt’s personal healing in the wild directly shaped his political agenda, turning him into the “Conservation President”. He recognized the immense psychological benefits of pristine, untouched wilderness and sought to preserve it for all Americans. During his presidency (1901–1909), he used his executive power to sign into existence:
- 5 National Parks
- 18 National Monuments
- 55 National Bird and Wildlife Refuges
- 150 National Forests
3. Lasting Legacy in North Dakota
Today, Theodore Roosevelt National Park in western North Dakota serves as a living monument to the landscape that offered him sanctuary during his darkest hours. The 70,000-acre park encompasses the rugged badlands and the Little Missouri River that Roosevelt credited with restoring his spirit and energy.
Explaining the cure for Neurasthenia:
Victorian-era neurologists theorized that the body functioned like an electrical machine, powered by energy distributed through the nervous system. When Americans spent too much energy navigating the extreme shifts and new worries in their modern lives, they experienced aches, pains, exhaustion, irritability, and malaise. Doctors also theorized that urban life only made such conditions worse by further taxing and weakening the body.
In response, a range of popular remedies and medical treatments for neurasthenia emerged. Some doctors recommended that women suffering symptoms should halt all physical and intellectual activity. Colloquially known as the “rest cure,” this treatment—famously recounted in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a horror novella written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman—involved isolation in the home, bed rest for weeks, and an embargo on reading, writing, drawing, socializing, and exercising.
Women patients and doctors, including New York City physician Grace Peckham, successfully argued that the rest cure was not only quack medicine but more harmful to patients than the nervous sickness itself. Thus, it didn’t stick.
What did catch on was the “West cure,” a different kind of treatment originally reserved for men. Neurologists worried that the urban environment, factory work and office jobs, and other modern pressures were making men tired, indecisive, and physically weak. On doctor’s orders, male patients ventured into the western wilderness, where, it was thought, the natural environment would inspire the mind and reinvigorate the body. Prescriptions emphasized physical exercise, including hiking and horseback riding.
The legacies of this are notable. In the 1880s, Theodore Roosevelt, a young, well-to-do New Yorker at the time, suffered from a range of neurasthenic conditions including asthma, and he sought treatment. Roosevelt was so inspired by his own privileged experience of the West cure, and its restorative outcomes, that later, as president, he built upon state park preservation and forest protection acts to dramatically expand federal support for public access to park lands, including National Parks. Most famously, in 1903, Roosevelt partnered with naturalist John Muir—also diagnosed as neurasthenic—to expand federal protection for Yosemite in the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California.
Initially, it was urban elite white men, like Roosevelt, who were most likely to have the means to travel and to pay for the therapy of riding horses, hunting game, and sleeping under the stars. But the notion of the natural world as an antidote for the stresses of modern life appealed broadly, across lines of class, race, and gender.
Although few Americans had access to medical care in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the idea that the body could be recharged through outdoor physical activity caught on thanks to the low-cost medical pamphlets, ads for over-the-counter remedies, advice columns, and simple word of mouth. The media-fueled desire to fend off neurasthenia drove a booming market in exercise equipment, including bicycles, and participation in cheap outdoor sports, like baseball and pedestrianism, a competitive walking trend.
By the end of the 19th century, city planners, imagining more healthful, walkable, livable urban environments, also incorporated green spaces for urban residents to enjoy for free. From small picnic areas and playgrounds to sprawling urban parks designed to feel like the bucolic countryside, American cities began providing West cure benefits without the steep price tag or the need to travel.
Camping became another popular, and more affordable, option for vacations from modernity. Working people could purchase a simple tent, one-burner stove, and a few other provisions, load up the horse and buggy and head to a park or campground just outside the city. This cheap and accessible alternative to West cure travel ballooned in popularity in the early 20th century, with the proliferation of camping guides and camping clubs, the growth of the National Park Service, and the introduction of the car. Enthusiasm for camping and national park tourism as affordable restorative activities endured through the 20th century. And they remain as popular as ever today.
Neurasthenia as a diagnostic category, has not endured. It disappeared in the early 20th century, thanks mainly to the rise of psychoanalysis and expanding knowledge about mental health and conditions like chronic fatigue, anxiety disorders, phobias, and depression.
But its most popular remedy—particularly exercise, outdoor recreation, and reflection in nature—has proved truly beneficial for both mental and physical health.
Amid unsettling changes, Americans touted the curative powers of the natural world, fueling the call for outdoor exercise and recreation, and laying the groundwork for the astounding growth of national and state park tourism. Today, with so much to worry about, it is important to remember how national and state parks, and the workers who run and sustain them, have long played a healing role in American society. As we head off to America’s many majestic park destinations—our favorite “mental health escapes” and “calmcation” getaways—may this history reinforce the need to preserve, protect, and invest in them, especially in uncertain times.
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