Existential Lessons of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Depression
Personal Perspective: “Depression doesn’t discriminate” misses the point of Dr. King’s experience
Historians have noted that Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. attempted suicide twice as a child — when his best friend died and again when his grandmother died — and also struggled with depression as an adult. Many mental health advocates have leveraged King’s personal history of depression to combat the stigma of mental illness, a humanizing gesture that makes a hero seem relatable. At the same time, however, I argue that this move oversimplifies the existential nature of King’s despair.
Mental health advocates have pondered whether King had a psychiatric disability, whether stigma deterred him from seeking help, and to what extent fears of retaliation and defamation pressured him to mask his feelings of depression. They also have suggested that depression was the shadow side of his empathy.
These possibilities — while thoughtful — detract from the political trauma that must have upended Dr. King’s philosophical development, leading to transformations that entailed depression, but weren’t necessarily treatable by clinical means.
We cannot forget that Dr. King spent 15 years witnessing firsthand that there was no “best” way to debunk or disarm white supremacy. A doctorate didn’t help. Devout Christianity didn’t help. Colorblindness didn’t help. Disavowing armed struggle didn’t help. Invoking the innocence of children and the frailty of the elderly didn’t help. Not even critiquing the capitalist exploitation of poor whites helped, since he found that many wouldn’t help themselves if it meant helping Black people.
Imagine strategizing the most non-confrontational, religiously palatable, socially respectable method of advocating for your human rights and still getting beaten, spat on, hosed, cursed at, and having your family home bombed. Imagine protesting with other clergy, yet having horses still trample you and dogs still snipe at you. Imagine being deferential to authorities, yet still getting jailed and surveilled. Imagine many folks, including many who looked like you, telling you to tone it down.
At the time of his assassination at age 39, Dr. King’s reputation stood in stark contrast to how we canonize him today. Public opinion of Dr. King was surprisingly low from around 1958 — when he rose to national prominence after leading a successful boycotting movement in Montgomery — until 1968. A Gallup poll from 1966 revealed that almost 66 percent of Americans viewed him unfavorably. Looking back today, the public seemed almost committed to misunderstanding his intentions in service of preserving the status quo.
Yet, instead of discussing the implications of this heightened level of alienation and scapegoating, mental health advocates often suggest Dr. King suffered from a form of clinical depression that could have been therapized or medicated away. I believe we should know better than to ever suggest this was the case, given both the history of weaponized diagnoses — like the case of protest psychosis and the mounting critiques of cognitive-behavioral therapy for promoting toxic positivity.
What is more, pathologizing not only plays into the revisionist history that reduces Dr. King to a Mr. Rogers-like figure and erases his anti-capitalist and anti-war politics; it also infantilizes him by assuming that he was not grappling with existential questions about the apparent futility of his activism, which stole years of his life and time from his family. An autopsy of Dr. King revealed that despite being only 39, life had aged his heart to resemble that of a 60-year-old.
Dr. King himself once confessed, “I am afraid I have led the people into a burning house.”
This vague statement seemed to belie a sad realization that the white supremacist racial order could be maintained even despite desegregation, namely via assimilation imposed through structural racism and racial capitalism.
Moreover, it seems Dr. King might’ve had the same epiphanies as his Afro-pessimist contemporaries. First, that anti-Blackness is foundational and fundamental to American white supremacy. And, second, that white supremacy defends and reinforces its legitimacy by constitutively excluding Black people from “the category of the self-possessing, rights-bearing human being of modernity.”
In other words, white supremacy positions Blackness as the sub-human antithesis of American whiteness, orchestrating a degree of alienation that cannot be summed up as simply political discrimination and social ostracization. This makes humanizing Blackness (to white supremacists) an impossible task and also frames those who attempt to do so as delusionally “uppitty” and/or dangerously unpatriotic.
It seems Dr. King learned the hard way that his post-racial dream shattered white racists’ sense of identity, which was almost entirely dependent on myths about their allegedly innate and immutable superiority — and there was a price to pay for shattering a people’s false sense of identity, without giving them anything to fill the void.
During a 1993 interview with Charlie Rose, Toni Morrison perceptively captured the existential threat many white racists perceive when they can no longer rely on the crutch of anti-Blackness:
“If the racist white person does not understand that he or she is also a race that is constructed, that is also made, that also has some kind of servicability… But when you take it away — if I take your race away, there you are, all strung out, and all you’ve got is your little self. And what is that? What are you without racism? Are you any good? Are you still strong? Still smart? Still like yourself? If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have a serious problem.”
Dr. King’s depression makes sense when we consider the resistance many white racists have to acknowledging that they have a racial identity to begin with, let alone to re-making their racial identity from scratch.
Perhaps the point of studying Dr. King’s depression is not that depression doesn’t discriminate, but that white supremacy won’t end until white racists grapple with the existential threat of losing their identity when Blackness and Black people are no longer the bottom rung they can depend on for cultural self-esteem.
