The unlucky, who, early in their lives, endure hardships and tragedies—or the challenge of mental illness—seem to become, not infrequently, our greatest leaders.

But she found that breast cancer patients saw the experience of serious illness and subsequent recovery as transformative; they didn’t just go back to being who they were.

Twice, before he was 13, he tried to commit suicide.

In times of crisis, we are better off being led by mentally ill leaders than by mentally normal ones.

King tried to commit suicide as a teenager; in fact, King made two attempts.

“The illness is a kind of robbery; it robs you of those you love. I don’t want money or power or fame. I just want to keep those I love. And this illness robs them from me. They wake up one day, and I am not the same person, and they say, ‘Who is this?’ And they leave.” The benefits of depression come at a painful, if not deadly, price.

But they don’t fully realize the negative aspects of the disease, which are usually even more pronounced than its benefits: irritability, promiscuous sexuality, and lavish spending.

Germany and its Nazi leaders were not much different, psychologically, from any nation or any leaders. And that’s the scary part.

depressive realism hypothesis. This theory argues that depressed people aren’t depressed because they distort reality; they’re depressed because they see reality more clearly than other people do.