Is it my imagination or is the entire White House on Prozac as of late? Don’t get me wrong, with every disclosure of a prominent and successful depressive, I dance the Macarena. But I’m just wondering if by going into politics, you are guaranteed to have some couch time with a therapist and a time-out every now and then to a “retreat house” full of psychiatrists, massage therapists, and yoga instructors.

We’ve known about the psychiatric problems of some political leaders for awhile–Abraham Lincoln (depression), Theodore Roosevelt (bipolar disorder), and Winston Churchill (bipolar disorder) to name a few.

But recently many more have spoken publicly or written honestly about their struggles with depression: Douglas Duncan (Maryland’s Montgomery County Executive), Lynn Rivers (former US House of Representative from Michigan, and the first member of the House to publicly discuss emotional problems), Tipper Gore, and Kitty Dukakis.

If you think I’m exaggerating the connection between politics and mood disorders, consider a study by psychiatrists at the Duke University Medical Center published in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease: of the 37 presidents researched (from 1789 to 1974), 18 (or 49 percent) were found to suffer a mental illness of some form, with depression as the most prevalent disorder, occurring at a rate of 24 percent. (I suspect the authors didn’t want to analyze the most current presidents for fear of, um, upsetting them.) At least 10 of the presidents were affected by episodes while in office, with symptoms interfering with their performance. (Does that make me feel better or worse?) Presidential mental illness does not seem to have caused any national calamities (given today’s mess, I might question that).

Here we go:

Franklin Pierce (depression), John Adams (bipolar), James Madison (depression), Calvin Coolidge (hypochondria, depression and social phobia—poor guy), Thomas Jefferson (social phobia), Ulysses Grant (social phobia), Lyndon Johnson (bipolar), John Quincy Adams (depression), Rutherford Hayes (depression), Woodrow Wilson (depression), Herbert Hoover (depression), and Dwight Eisenhower (depression).

In a “Washington Post” article published last year, reporter Neely Tucker compared the public’s reaction to Montgomery County Executive Douglas Duncan who dropped out of the Maryland governor’s race because of clinical depression to the stigma about mental illness in 1972, when U.S. Senator Tom Eagleton got dumped from the vice presidential spot on the ballot after word got out that he had undergone ECT (or electroconvulsive therapy).

Arguing that the public’s attitude toward mental illness is much more accepting these days, Tucker cited the examples of Florida Governor Lawton Chiles–who was elected to two terms as governor after he admitted he was treating his depression with Prozac–and Representative Patrick Kennedy, who was voted back to office (with 67 percent of the vote) after disclosing his bipolar disorder.

I like these news bits because they are filled with hope and encouragement for a depressive like me. If half of our presidents have bad wiring and neurological stuff going on in their brains–not to mention all the other politicians I mentioned–and they can perform their duties, that means there is a good chance that my bipolar disorder doesn’t have to stand in the way of my dream, either.