Having a president who's a little crazy could be a good thing

Ghaemi isn’t the first to claim that madness is a close relative of genius, or even the first to extend the idea into politics. But he does go further than others, finding sickness in business leaders (CNN founder Ted Turner), social activists (Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi), and military commanders (Union Army Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman), as well as Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and John F. Kennedy. His explanations are elegant, too—intuitively accurate and banked off the latest psychiatric research.

Depression in all its forms (which Ghaemi finds in Abraham Lincoln and the mildly bipolar Churchill) brings suffering, which makes one more clear-eyed, fit to recognize the world’s problems, and able to face them down like the noonday demon. Mania in all its forms (which Ghaemi detects in FDR and JFK) brings resilience, which helps one learn from failure, often with enough creativity to make a new start. Most originally, Ghaemi coins “the inverse law of sanity”: the perils of well-being. It’s why the poor, sane Neville Chamberlain chummed around with Nazi leaders while Churchill’s “black dog” foresaw a fight.