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Donald Trump is not the first president to be described as distraught, as much by his political enemies as by his medical professionals. But some of his predecessors were manic-depressive, bipolar and even psychopathic, experts say.
During the summer of 1776, the United States' war of independence was so harsh for the rebels that George Washington apparently tried to commit suicide.
While his militiamen were fleeing in panic at Kip's Bay, Manhattan, the 44-year-old Supreme Commander had fallen into the catatonic state, according to biographer Ron Chernow.
Washington was sitting on horseback and staring into space as dozens of British soldiers loaded him across a cornfield.
The assistants of the future first President of the United States seized his mount and managed to find him with difficulty.
One of his generals, Nathanael Greene, later stated that the Virginian was "so upset by the infamous conduct of his troops that he sought death rather than life".
Washington's alleged emotional breakdown illustrates how even the biggest of the leaders of the crisis can break under the pressure.
Nearly two and a half centuries later, the mental state of his political descendant is being examined a little less leniently.
Presidential psychiatry has been raging ever since Donald Trump entered the White House.
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Trump is not the first president to be asked about his mental health
There is even an editorial sub-genre devoted to putting the 45th president on the sofa of the shrink.
The dangerous case of Donald Trump: 27 psychiatrists and experts in mental health evaluate a president, Rocket Man: nuclear madness and the spirit of Donald Trump, A clear and present danger: Narcissism in the time of Donald Trump and Twilight of American Mental Health: A psychiatrist analyzes Trump's age.
But Mr. Trump – who claims to be a "very stable genius" – is by no means the first American leader to present himself as crazy.
John Adams, the second president, was described by his great rival Jefferson as "sometimes absolutely crazy".
Philadelphia Aurora, spokesperson for Jefferson's Day, besieged Adams as "a man without meaning".
Theodore Roosevelt, theorized in the contemporary Journal of Abnormal Psychology, "would go down in history as one of the most illustrious psychological examples of the distortion of conscious mental processes".
While Roosevelt was campaigning in 1912 to return to the presidency, the eminent American historian Henry Adams said, "His mind has collapsed … his neurosis could end in a nervous collapse or acute mania."
After Woodrow Wilson had a stroke, his critics claimed that the White House had become an insane asylum, highlighting the bars on some windows on the first floor of the executive mansion.
But as John Milton Cooper tells in his biography of Wilson, these barrettes were actually arranged under the presidency of Teddy Roosevelt to prevent his young son from breaking windows with their baseball.
And yet, according to a psychiatric analysis of the first 37 chief commanders, Adams, Roosevelt and Wilson did have mental health problems.
The 2006 study estimated that 49% of presidents suffered from a mental illness at some point in their lives (a figure that researchers say would correspond to national rates).
Twenty-seven per cent of them were found to be affected while performing their duties.
More about American presidents
Of these, one out of four meets the diagnostic criteria for depression, including Woodrow Wilson and James Madison, said the team at the Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina.
They also concluded that Teddy Roosevelt and John Adams had bipolar disorder, while Thomas Jefferson and Ulysses Grant had social anxiety.
Professor Jonathan Davidson, who led the study, said: "The pressures of such work can cause problems for someone who has been latent.
"Being president is extremely stressful and no one has the unlimited ability to take it forever."
Woodrow Wilson was a victim of a stroke in 1919 during a failed battle to pass the Versailles Treaty.
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First Lady Edith Wilson attends President Woodrow Wilson at his White House office
This left him unfit and depressed and paranoid until the end of his presidency in 1921.
The first woman, Edith Wilson, practically ran the White House, letting the opponents rant about "government by petticoat".
By the time Wilson left office, said a reporter, he was a "collapsed fragment of the man" that he had been.
Paralysis of mourning
Two other presidencies are thought to have been completely destroyed by clinical depression.
According to Professor Davidson, a major depressive disorder made Calvin Coolidge and Franklin Pierce ineffective as leaders after the deaths of their sons.
Pierce suffered a terrible tragedy just prior to his inauguration in 1853. The 14th President, his wife Jane and their son Benjamin were on a train when he derailed near Andover, Massachusetts.
The car was thrown on an embankment and Benny was nearly beheaded. He died instantly.
At the age of 11, he was the only survivor of the three sons born to Pierces.
The Democratic President wrote to Jefferson Davis, his secretary of war, "How can I summon my manhood and gather my energies for all the duties entrusted to me, it is difficult for me to see."
According to Professor Davidson, Pierce's inner turmoil led to giving up any real executive role as the country headed for civil war.
He was the only president to ever have been elected on his own to suffer the indignity of being abandoned by his own party in the next election.
Pierce's pain, combined with the stress of presiding over a country about to tear up, would also have exacerbated his longstanding abuse of alcohol.
He died of diseases related to liver failure, according to biographer Michael F Holt.
Coolidge took office as an optimistic, hard-working and energetic leader.
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Pierce was devastated by the death of his son
But in the summer of 1924, Calvin Jr, his 16-year-old son, went to play on the White House tennis court, wearing sneakers without socks.
The boy had a foot blister, which was infected, and he died of blood poisoning.
According to the biography of Amity Shales, Coolidge would have been responsible for the death of the teenager.
He commissioned tombstones for himself, his wife and surviving son, John, as well as for Calvin Jr.
"Every time I look out the window," said the president, "I always see my boy playing tennis on that court there."
His behavior has become more and more erratic. He would explode with anger at the guests, the helpers and the family.
During a dinner at the White House, he focused on the portrait of President John Quincy Adams, noting that his head was too bright.
More about Trump's health
Coolidge ordered a maid to rub a rag into the ashes of the fireplace, climb a ladder and dab it on the board to darken Adams' head.
(John Quincy Adams also suffered depression and languished in the White House, playing billiards and irritating his wife of British descent, according to a biography of Harlow Giles Unger.)
Coolidge is almost removed from politics. Most worrying was his ignorance about economic alarm bells a year before the 1929 Wall Street crash.
While the legislation was deemed to contain galloping stock market speculation, he told reporters, "I do not know what it is, what are its provisions or what was the discussion."
In his autobiography, the 30th president wrote: "When he [my son] gone, the power and glory of the presidency went with him.
"I do not know why such a price was required to occupy the White House."
The other presidents were able to recover from the Gethsemane of personal mourning.
Theodore Roosevelt fought a serious depression early in his political career after the death of his young wife and mother on Valentine's Day in 1884.
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Teddy Roosevelt escaped to the Dakota Badlands after the death of his first wife
He left for a few years in the Badlands, Dakota, where he built a ranch, hunted buffalo, arrested thieves, and knocked out a gun in a living room.
"Black Care is really behind a runner whose pace is fast enough," he said.
Abraham Lincoln has been subject all his life to melancholy, according to biographer David Herbert Donald.
In 1841, in Springfield, Illinois, while he was a state legislator, Abe broke his engagement with Mary Todd (they were finally getting married) and plunged into a deep depression.
A friend put him under surveillance, removing razors and knives from his room.
Rumor has it that he went crazy in the capital.
Given his morose character, the attendees had to fear how he would manage during the American Civil War with the death of his 11-year-old son Willie, probably from typhoid fever, at the White House in February 1862.
Later that year, after another humiliating defeat, this time at the second Bull Run battle, Lincoln told his office that he felt almost ready to hang himself, according to Donald's book.
But despite his sorrow, the 16th president managed to maintain himself and preserve the union.
It was only after Willie's death that Lincoln finally sacked his flailing military commander, George McLellan.
He replaced him with a depressive, shy and likely alcoholic, panicked by the sight of blood: Ulysses Grant would lead the Union's army to victory.
Presidents "psychopaths"
Despite the persistent stigma of mental illness, some experts believe this can help some leaders – to some extent.
A 2012 study by psychologists from Emory University in Georgia found that several presidents had psychopathic traits, including Bill Clinton.
Lyndon Baines Johnson and Andrew Jackson, Mr. Trump's hero, were the most psychopathic.
The Emory team identified psychopathic attributes as superficial charm, egocentrism, dishonesty, harshness, risk-taking, poor impulse control, and fearlessness.
The research covered all the presidents except the current president and Barack Obama.
Professor Scott Lilienfeld, who led the study, said: "I suspect that in the long run these traits will catch up with others.
"So yes, they could allow people to take leadership positions.
"I am less confident that they will lead to better overall leadership, especially in the long run."
LBJ, for example, had an ego the size of its original state, Texas.
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LBJ was famous domineering
He brazenly stole his Senate elections in 1948, before mocking it even more shamefully, according to Robert Caro's multi-volume biography.
Johnson was not thinking of putting his hand in another woman's skirt while his wife, Lady Bird, was sitting next to him.
He liked humiliating the children by calling them to take the dictation while he was urinating in a sink or doing his toilet needs.
However, the seeds of Alamo, a politician, could have been sown in his widely suspected lies to the American people about a false naval docking in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964.
Johnson used the incident to dramatically escalate the American war in Vietnam.
But four years later, amid the hurricane of the Tet Offensive, LBJ announced that he would not run for re-election.
Andrew Jackson – who signed the Indian withdrawal law and aimed at cleaning up ethnic populations – is now more known for his cruelty than for the enviable achievement of being the only president ever to have repaid the national debt.
And of course, Bill Clinton's reputation was in shambles because of his sexual impulsiveness.
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John Adams may have been bipolar and described by rival Thomas Jefferson as "sometimes absolutely crazy"
Some presidents have handled the Oval Office's constraints less well than others.
Even as Vice President, Richard Nixon was taking prescription medications for the treatment of anxiety and depression, as well as sleeping pills that were sore by alcohol.
John A Farrell's biography explains how the unstable leader of Watergate drank too much during his turbulent tenure.
Recordings of the White House record it in his words amid ice cubes.
Henry Kissinger, his top diplomat, once said that Nixon could not receive a call from the British prime minister during a Middle East crisis because he was "loaded".
His psychotherapist, Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker, was the only mental health professional ever to have treated a White House president.
He said that Nixon had "a good deal of neurotic symptoms".
And so, is Donald Trump mentally ill?
Professor Davidson's chair diagnosis is no. He cites a debate among psychiatrists around the world as to whether narcissism – a trait so often attributed to the current president – is even a personality disorder in good faith.
But Nassir Ghaemi – author of A Great Folly: Discovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness – believes that President Trump suffers from "classic manic symptoms".
The professor of psychiatry at Tufts University Medical School in Boston says, "He does not sleep much at all, he has a very high level of physical energy.
"He is very impulsive with spending, sexually impulsive, he can not concentrate.
"His features were particularly beneficial during the presidential campaign, where he was extremely creative.
"He could understand things that normal, stable, and healthy people like Hillary Clinton, for example, did not do."
We are told so often that the Trump presidency broke the historical norms.
But the strange and troubled life of former chief commanders seems to raise the following question: what is normal?
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