About me: background, credentials etc.
Back in May Mark Sumner wrote in Donald Trump produces his most Queeg-worthy tweet to date:
While the thought that Donald Trump has definitely lost his strawberries is common enough, a tweet Trump produced on Monday evening was enough to keep any number of review boards pondering for months.
He was referring to this Tweet:
Now we have Trump obsessed with fears which, if they weren’t based on fact, would fit the clinical definition of paranoia:
Paranoia is an instinct or thought process believed to be heavily influenced by anxiety or fear, often to the point of delusion and irrationality.[1]Paranoid thinking typically includes persecutory, or beliefs of conspiracy concerning a perceived threat towards oneself (e.g. the American colloquial phrase,"Everyone is out to get me"). Paranoia is distinct from phobias, which also involve irrational fear, but usually no blame. Making false accusations and the general distrust of others also frequently accompany paranoia. For example, an incident most people would view as an accidentor coincidence, a paranoid person might believe was intentional. Paranoia is a central symptom of psychosis.[2] It is also a matter of personal tolerance for the individual that might be in conflict with psychiatric diagnoses.
….
Self-consciousness was characterized as an aversive psychological state. According to this model, people experiencing self-consciousness will be highly motivated to reduce it, trying to make sense of what they are experiencing. These attempts promote hyper vigilance and rumination in a circular relationship: more hyper vigilance generates more rumination, whereupon more rumination generates more hyper vigilance. Hyper vigilance can be thought of as a way to appraise threatening social information, but in contrast to adaptive vigilance, hyper vigilance will produce elevated levels of arousal, fear, anxiety, and threat perception.[44] Rumination is another possible response to threatening social information. Rumination can be related to the paranoid social cognition because it can increase negative thinking about negative events, and evoke a pessimistic explanatory style.
Wikipedia
The introduction to this Washington Post article explains the references to Capt. Queeg, strawberries, and non-existent secret icebox keys:
The USS Caine was on the verge of foundering, nearly drowning in the waves of a typhoon in the middle of the Pacific, and Capt. Queeg looked scared.
The neurotic naval officer, played by Humphrey Bogart in the 1954 Oscar-nominated movie “The Caine Mutiny,” clung to the ship like it was going under while his crew yelled out to him for orders. It seemed Queeg was testing their last nerve.
The crew, as of late, believed the captain was out of his mind. He had recently ordered a sweeping investigation into who ate a missing quart of strawberries from the kitchen, believing the apprehension of this strawberry thief was of singular importance. In a second fit of paranoia, Queeg ordered the sailors to search for a nonexistent secret key to the icebox, believing it would lead to the thief. Now the captain was frozen in fear — believing he had everything under control.
“Captain, I’m sorry, but you’re a sick man,” executive officer Stephen Maryk told him at the climax of the movie, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Herman Wouk. “I’m relieving you as captain of this ship under Article 184.”
And with that, the captain lost his power.
How accurate is the analogy?
In the White House, somebody has truly eaten Trump’s precious strawberries.
This part is accurate.
The nonexistent secret icebox keys are analogous to Trump's belief that nobody would dare try to undermine his absolute authority.
Therefore, this part is accurate too.
To the extent that President Trump is already clinically demonstrating paranoid ideation at least intermittently and at least to some extent, we can expect his anxiety to increase and for him to lash out with rage as he generally does when he feels threatened.
This is not new with me, I heard it on MSNBC, but it is akin to Trump living the experience depicted in horror movies when the terrified person huddling beset with panic in the living room realizes that the threatening phone calls are coming from somewhere inside the house.
Trump’s personality has already generated a field of scientific study called trumpology.
He is an experiment in progress.
Those of us in the mental health field and the general public as well are learning the answer to the question “what happens when a paranoid discovers he really does have enemies?”
.Related:
Anonymous op-ed to fuel Trump's volatility, paranoia and hostility — The Hill
by Tom Kolditz, founding director of the Ann and John Doerr Institute for New Leaders at Rice University.
The research suggests three distinct reactions by President Trump, all of which are disastrous for his ability to lead. First, he is likely to identify his staff as less competent and to listen to them less than before being challenged by the op-ed.
The opposite would be true for those he knows for sure are loyal — but exactly who might those people be? Thus, for those who are worried that President Trump tends not to listen to staff, hold onto your hats, it is likely to get much worse.
Second, the research would predict that the op-ed would trigger ego defensiveness because the letter is an unquestionable threat to the president’s self-image. This defensive stance will cause an increase in the president’s tendency to denigrate people, especially people with suggestions counter to his.
Such ego protective behavior will manifest in a near paranoid suspicion of other around him — something already apparent in his personality.
Previous diary:
Distinguished shrinks weigh in on the anonymous N.Y. Times OpEd, and so do I