It’s been over three months since a long interview by Chauncey DeVega with Dr. John Gartner, founder of the Duty to Warn movement, was published in Salon. Now parts of it have been republished on two websites. These are about Trump’s sadism. From the original interview:
“When I first started talking about Trump as a malignant narcissist, people could see the narcissism, the paranoia and the antisocial element. But the fourth component of malignant narcissism is sadism.
"You see it in everything he does, from the separating of the children at the border to how Trump tortures anyone who doesn't give him what he wants. There's a way in which he takes a kind of manic glee in causing harm and pain and humiliation to other people.”
“They also become more unrestrained in their sadism and in their will to power. Malignant narcissists like Trump are antisocial and have a willingness to do anything to get and keep power. The noted psychologist Erich Fromm actually argued that such personalities then begin to verge on psychosis at that point, becoming so grandiose and paranoid that they really live on the boundary of psychosis and reality.”
(The website states that it is an "internationally recognized news website read by more than 40 million unique visitors each month.” Wikipedia)
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These two articles go back to the Salon interview from June 13th, so there's nothing new here. The articles pull out and focus on the elements of sadism in Trump’s personality from the Gartner interview. Salon is far more read than Inquisitor, which got the story from the even less well-read The Intellectualist - and unfortunately, both these websites keep erroneously referring John D. Gartner as a psychiatrist rather than a clinical psychologist, and a practicing psychotherapist who taught psychiatric residents at Johns Hopkins University Medical School .
The original interview was published in Salon:
Both Alternet and RawStory republished the article and featured it on the top of their main page. At the time it was published Newsbusters: Combating Liberal Media Bias thought it was worth attacking in its headline (right).
John Gartner is a clinical psychologist, not a psychiatrist, so he is not bound by rules from the American Psychiatric Association. This was an error in the Salon article. Gartner founded the Duty to Warn movement and has been referenced and interviewed many times. The movement gained notoriety with his petition urging Trump be removed under the provisions of the 25th Amendment.
Instead of debating whether a mental health professional should or can diagnose a public figure from a distance, how about digging down into why Trump exhibits so many traits, behaviors, and characteristics which lead hundreds of experienced clinicians (like me) to conclude he has psychopathology that makes him unstable, erratic, unpredictable, easily insulted, prone to reactive bullying, vengeful, wanting to punish anyone who isn't a sycophant, lacking in empathy, unwilling to listen and learn from experts who disagree with him, and willing to believe the likes of Alex Jones who espouse paranoid conspiracy theories.
The primary reason that his diagnosis matters is that this tells us whether Trump is capable of changing the particular mix of personality disorders which many clinicians see ample evidence of is that these personality disorders are not considered treatable because, in part, those people don't suffer, they make other people suffer, and thus they never seek help.
Dr. Howard Dean, a physician who previously served as the governor of Vermont, told MSNBC on Sunday that Donald Trump suffers from mental illness and he is unfit to be president.
“I’ve long believed the president is mentally ill,” Dean said as part of a panel discussion hosted by Alex Witt, Raw Story reported. “And I believe narcissism overcomes his ability to know, A, what’s good for the country, and B, what’s good for him.”
Dean’s remarks came in the context of Trump’s response to the death of Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona. The president repeatedly attacked McCain for opposing his policies and was reportedly not invited to the senator’s funeral.
For more information about how Trump is psychologically incapable of governing even if you don’t subscribe to the Washington Post I suggest you use one of your free clicks to read “Bob Woodward’s new book reveals a ‘nervous breakdown’ of Trump’s presidency.”
Tuesday, Sep 4, 2018 · 6:39:09 PM +00:00 · HalBrown
Sadistic personality disorder is a personality disorder involving sadism which appeared in an appendix of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III-R).[1]The later versions of the DSM (DSM-IV, DSM-IV-TR and DSM-5) do not include it… though perhaps they should have.
This is from Wikipedia
Sadism involves deriving pleasure through themselves or others undergoing discomfort or pain. The opponent-process theory explains the way in which individuals not only display, but also enjoy committing sadistic acts.[2][clarification needed] Individuals possessing sadistic personalities tend to display recurrent aggression and cruel behavior.[3][4] Sadism can also include the use of emotional cruelty, purposefully manipulating others through the use of fear, and a preoccupation with violence.[5]
Theodore Millon claimed there were four subtypes of sadism, which he termed Enforcing sadism, Explosive sadism, Spineless sadism, and Tyrannical sadism.[6][7][8]
Sadistic personality disorder has been found to occur frequently in unison with other personality disorders. Studies have also found that sadistic personality disorder is the personality disorder with the highest level of comorbidity to other types of psychopathological disorders.[5] In contrast, sadism has also been found in patients who do not display any or other forms of psychopathic disorders.[9] One personality disorder that is often found to occur alongside sadistic personality disorder is conduct disorder, not an adult disorder but one of childhood and adolescence.[5] Studies have found other types of illnesses, such as alcoholism, to have a high rate of comorbidity with sadistic personality disorder.[10]
Researchers have had some level of difficulty distinguishing sadistic personality disorder from other forms of personality disorders due to its high level of comorbidity with other disorders.[5]
Numerous theorists and clinicians introduced sadistic personality disorder to the DSM in 1987 and it was placed in the DSM-III-R as a way to facilitate further systematic clinical study and research. It was proposed to be included because of adults who possessed sadistic personality traits but were not being labeled, even though their victims were being labeled with a self-defeating personality disorder.[11] Theorists like Theodore Millon wanted to generate further study on SPD, and so proposed it to the DSM-IV Personality Disorder Work Group, who rejected it.[6]
There is renewed interest in studying sadism as a personality trait.[4][12] Sadism joins with subclinical psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism to form the so-called "dark tetrad" of personality.[4][13]