Thursday, June 4, 2020

Alarming . . .


(from The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump; 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President by Bandy Lee, M.D., M.Div.)
". . . It doesn't take a psychiatrist to notice that our president is mentally compromised. Members of the press have come up with their own diagnostic nomenclature calling the president a "mad king" (Dowd 2017), a "nut job" (Collins 2017), and "emotionally unhinged" (Rubin 2017). Conservative columnist George Will (2017) writes that the president has a "disorderly mind." By speaking out as mental health professionals, we lend support and dignity to our fellow citizens who are justifiably alarmed by the president's furious tirades, conspiracy fantasies, aversion to facts, and attraction to violence. We can offer a hand helping the public understand behaviors that are unusual and alarming but that can all too easily be rationalized and normalized. . ."

". . . Bandy Xenobia Lee . . . attracted attention for organizing a conference at Yale on professional ethics surrounding the mental health of Donald Trump. She withheld her views at the conference but later prominently criticized the American Psychiatric Association for changing an ethical guideline called the Goldwater rule with the Trump presidency. In March 2017, the association had expanded the rule to restrict not just diagnosis but any comment on the mental health of public figures absent a personal examination, misleadingly calling it a "reaffirmation." This change alarmed Lee and her colleagues enough to lead to her conference and, later, to co-authoring The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, a book of essays that warned against the dangers of Trump's mental instability. . ."