There’s an old American phrase, “clear grit”, which means: the real thing; dedicated and persistent; that quality promoting resilience in the aftermath of adversity. It’s the phrase which inspired the nickname, the Grits, for The Liberal Party of Canada.

Many, however, are wondering if it’s still a fitting title. After its worst showing ever the party looks broken, weakened, uncertain, engulfed by doubts about its place in the Canadian political landscape.

Enter Bob Rae as interim leader.

If we take seriously the lessons of a new book, A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness, Rae’s selection may be a stroke of genius.

Rae, the former NDP premier of Ontario, has been open about his experience with depression. Nassir Ghaemi, professor of psychiatry at Tufts Medical Center, makes the case that the most effective leaders during crisis are those who have been burdened by some (though not too much) mental illness.

“The best crisis leaders are either mentally ill or mentally abnormal;” he writes, striking a decidedly counterintuitive note, “the worst crisis leaders are mentally healthy.”

Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King Jr., Franklin Delano Roosevelt: all outliers in the conventional vision of mental health, according to Ghaemi, yet all undeniably good leaders because their personal demons had the upside of fostering what the author considers the four crucial elements of leadership: creativity, resilience, realism and empathy.

The research supporting the phenomenon of “depressive realism,” for instance, is extensive. He describes an experiment showing that depressed subjects were better than their contented counterparts at recognizing how little control they had in a game involving random light switching. Other studies have shown that temporarily inducing sadness tends to make subjects more aware of details in their environment. A downbeat mood appears to enhance one’s ability to see things in their precise shape — and perhaps even vice-versa.

In an interview with the Toronto Star, Ghaemi compares the depressive Churchill with Neville Chamberlain. “He, as well as many of the other leaders of Britain at the time,” says Ghaemi, “were overly optimistic about the Nazi threat. Realism can make one aware of very unpleasant realities.”

Viewing reality the way it is, however disheartening, is important, but not always enough. To do so and stand unwavering is the real trick. And, like a vaccine, traumatic events which might produce depression also tend to toughen a person. Churchill “had courage beyond reason ... because he had faced death many times before 1940,” writes Ghaemi, “and not only during pitched battles found in exotic lands, but within his daily life.”

A scatological saying, coming from the Mossi, a people of central Burkina Faso, comes to mind. “He who suffers from diarrhea does not fear the night.” Sorrow in one’s daily life tends to prepare one for whatever else life might throw at you.

As Ghaemi states it: “there’s some research that indicates that people who have experienced depression in the past are able to face experimental settings where it’s being induced, such as watching a very sad movie clip, and they don’t experience as much of it in that experimental setting as others who have not experienced depression in the past.”

What emerges from this study of past leaders and the qualities of good leadership is the comfortable association of vulnerability and strength. Lincoln, for instance, was once described as being like “steel and velvet . . . hard as rock and soft as drifting fog.”

In a CBC interview, Rae articulated his experience. “I had some kind of depression that was really quite bewildering for me and I think for the people around me,” he said. “There’s a feeling of apartness.” How his admissions of inner struggles have informed his outlook, and whether they have steeled him to further knocks and bruises, is an open question.

It also remains to be seen if these admissions will prove to be a political liability. The current state of politics is such that no one can own up to personal demons without risking their career.

What, for instance, would we have thought of William Lyon Mackenzie King in this day of looking askance at idiosyncratic, even strange, politicians? As Prime Minister of Canada during the Second World War, serving for 22 years, longer than any other leader, he was such an effective and stabilizing force in Parliament that a group of historians, in Prime Ministers: Ranking Canada’s Leaders, placed him first. He was also a dedicated spiritualist who often spoke with the dead and who spent a great deal of time exploring what he called “psychical research.”

“I think we should be looking at it with a very open mind — with the view that a bit of abnormality is not bad,” says Ghaemi. “I think a good example of how we should not select our leaders is by choosing the person with whom we would like to have beer.”

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And so Rae, recently dubbed Bob “The Builder,” finds himself the face of a dazed and wobbling party.

An article published by The New York Times Magazine, “Depression’s Upside”, makes the case that there are some cognitive benefits to melancholy and that it might even promote a crucial character trait. Quoted in the piece, Nancy Andreasen, a neuroscientist who surveyed 30 writers from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, highlights something about the best of those authors. They “are like prizefighters who keep on getting hit but won’t go down” and who “stick with it until it’s right.”

They had grit. Clear grit.