As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimated, 1 in 10 Americans suffers from depression. Believe it or not, it also applies to our leaders: we had plenty of mentally ill US presidents.
Today, we’re going to discuss all the mood disorders that affected some of the most important political figures in our country, and before you start reading the article, I wonder if you can pinpoint what names are on this list!
There’s a 2006 article written by psychiatrists from Duke University Medical Center that carefully reviewed the biographies of all American presidents from 1776 to 1974. The study was later published in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, analyzing historical data from over 37 presidents to look for possible symptoms of mental illnesses.
What they discovered was simply astonishing because, according to these Duke researchers, 49% of former presidents suffered from some form of mental illness. Among all of them, depression was the most common. So let’s unpack this list of mentally ill US presidents together. Are you ready?
