Mary certainly needed a great deal of protection, or at least looking after, for she had mental problems, including manic depression. Orville H. Browning, who thought her “demented,” recalled that she “was a girl of much vivacity in conversation, but was subject to … spells of mental depression.… As we used familiarly to state it she was always ‘either in the garret or cellar.’ ” A childhood friend, Margaret Stuart, testified that Mary in her Kentucky years was “very highly strung, nervous, impulsive, excitable, having an emotional temperament much like an April day, sunning all over with laughter one moment, the next crying as though her heart would break.” Manic depression is not the only diagnosis that seems to fit Mary Lincoln’s condition; she exhibited many symptoms associated with narcissism and with borderline personality disorder. In later life, after Lincoln’s death, her instability grew very marked. Her nephew, Albert Stevenson Edwards, believed that she “was insane from the time of her husband[’s] death until her own death.” In 1875, an Illinois court adjudged her insane and had her confined in a mental hospital. But even before the tragedy of the assassination, David Davis, alluding to her conduct as First Lady during the Civil War, called her a “natural born thief” for whom “stealing was a sort of insanity.” In fact, he thought she was “deranged” as far back as the 1840s.
Source: Abraham Lincoln ∶ A Life ▫𓂃