Response to the article on Churchill and ‘black dog’

The article by Daniels and Vale of evidence relevant to the question of Winston Churchill and ‘black dog’ depression is by far the most thorough and penetrating one undertaken to date by clinicians. I intend no criticism when I offer the following as a footnote to their article.¹

The deduced ‘possibility that Churchill suffered from non-occupationally disabling mild depression before 1911’ would have been reinforced by a modest lengthening of the partial quote from his ‘black dog’ letter concerning the restored good health of his cousin’s wife, Alice Guest. It is important to give in direct speech Churchill’s having been ‘interested… a great deal’ by what she had to say about a doctor in Germany who ‘completely cured her depression’. This enables the reader to gain a more precise understanding of why Churchill commented that the (unnamed) doctor ‘might be useful’ to him in the future. If one allows the reasonable assumption that during Churchill’s ‘very nice dinner’ with Alice and her husband she mentioned some of the details of her illness, it seems not improbable that he had been interested a ‘great deal’ by Alice’s disclosure primarily because he recognised a close resemblance between her depression, which had been ‘completely cured’, and his own ‘black dog’.

It remains only to say that, as I have argued elsewhere, the fact of a complete cure of depression at the period in question is strongly suggestive of the ‘non-occupationally disabling mild depression’ that Daniels and Vale equate with Churchill’s pre-1911 ‘black dog’,² a fortiori, were research into the question of the unnamed doctor and his therapeutic modus operandi to establish that ‘psychotherapy’ had completely cured Alice Guest’s depression. Some progress is being made in my own research into the said question; I hope to publish final results in due course.

Declarations

Competing interests

none declared.