A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness by Nassir Ghaemi

(Penguin, $28)

If you sometimes suspect that our political leaders are nuts, Nassir Ghaemi has written just the book for you, said Stephen Lowman in The Washington Post. The Tufts University psychiatry professor believes you’re right, though there’s a twist: He contends that madness in a leader is actually a good thing. “In Ghaemi’s view, a leader who has managed a lifetime of mental highs and lows is better equipped to handle trying situations.” Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy, for instance, were all superb leaders who suffered from sometimes debilitating mood disorders. Next year, when we’re grilling our 2012 presidential candidates about the economy or taxes, Ghaemi will probably be rooting for someone to also ask: “Do you ever have persistent sad, anxious, or empty feelings?”

Ghaemi might even convince a few readers that a healthy mind is a leadership liability, said Alice Gregory in The Boston Globe. In addition to his profiles of figures whose mental illness supposedly aided their decision-making, he provides “frequent counterexamples of less-than-successful leaders whose ambitions were actually thwarted by their sanity.” For every William T. Sherman, whose manic depression may have made him an unorthodox Civil War tactician, there is a George McClellan, whose rationality was a handicap.

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Too often, unfortunately, the argument just comes across as wishful thinking, said Michael Bond in New Scientist. Though it’s become fashionable these days for psychiatrists to “talk up the positive side of mental illness,” their case should be built on evidence rather than speculation. People who suffer depression are known to be more ruminative, but that hardly proves that Churchill’s depression was key to his acute assessment of the threat posed by Hitler. Even more troubling is that Ghaemi sometimes seems to be “shoehorning his protagonists” into characterizations that don’t fit. Richard Nixon, who exhibited paranoia consistent with bipolar disorder, is here identified as one of recent history’s more mentally stable leaders. Need I say more?