If you read enough about British politics, as I have recently, you’ll likely see an unexplained reference to a “black dog” in something you read. In case you too have been obsessively following the ins and outs of ‘old country’ politics, I thought it could be useful to explain that term.
Most Anglophiles would agree that Winston Churchill was the greatest prime minister in the last century. His career had many ups and downs, pauses and sudden accelerations. So, we learned later, did his mood.
Mostly after the fact, it came out that his was a borderline bipolar or manic-depressive personality. Churchill used the energy of the “ups” in his work, as successful near-bipolar people do.
His derogatory name for the “downs” of depression was “the black dog,” from which he apparently suffered throughout his life. It may be the case that he only used the actual descriptor to his wife Clementine.
It was a negative term Churchill borrowed from old English folklore, as echoed in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles.
