I have typed my fingers to the bone about how Trump has exhibited psychopathology which, to be decidedly unprofessional, is up the woo-woo on any scale mental health therapists use. I am sometimes reduced to saying to my friends, about a dozen or so who are retired psychotherapists like me, that he is batshopiut kray-kray. They know what I mean. So do you.
Now we have Trump retweeting this tweet and video. If you haven’t seen it and want to play psychiatrist, watch it and ask yourself what does it say about anyone who believes what this man is saying.
In the past week, what with Trump’s reactions to the Dayton and ElPaso shootings and the Epstein death under suspicious circumstance he seems, to be unprofessional, to have lost it. Clinicians call this decompensation.
A few excerpts:
“It just seems so quaint now,” says John Gartner, a clinical psychologist who started the petition, of his profession’s reluctance to use its expertise to publicly voice concerns. “I mean, everyone’s shell-shocked. It’s almost beyond this fine point of diagnosis — just the sense that someone who is very ill and dangerous is completely out of control, and no one seems to be stopping him.”
“People like Donald Trump who have severe narcissistic disturbances can’t tolerate being criticized,” says (Lance) Dodes (a former professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School) “so the more they are challenged in this essential way, the more out of control they become. They change reality to suit themselves in their own mind.” And, as Dodes explains, it creates a vicious cycle: The more out of control Trump becomes, the more reason others have to challenge him, which only makes him more out of control. When he tells a rally crowd that America will become “a third-world country” if he gets impeached, that’s this defensive/delusional coupling playing out in real time.
From Bandy Lee, MD: “Mr. Trump as a person could be removed from office and no longer be dangerous,” she points out. But in office, his dangerousness is so profound that she believes he meets the criteria for immediate intervention. “He, through his own words, has expressed an attraction to nuclear weapons, a preoccupation with nuclear weapons, and has even asked why we have them if we won’t use them,” she says. “When someone is dangerous, that is considered an emergency, so you try to get the person’s consent, but if they don’t offer it then you have no choice but to treat. And that’s an obligation; that’s not a choice on the part of the physician. There ought to be a political equivalent.”
Again, a reminder, this was from November, 2018! This was nine months ago.
If Trump, even fleetingly, believes conspiracy theories like this I could use colloquialisms or terms in common usage like saying he is “certifiable” but to put on my clinical hat I have to point out that the ability to engage in what therapists call "reality testing" is the hallmark of determining whether a person is mentally stable. The simple Wikipedia definition is as good as any from a scholarly article: “Reality testing is the psychotherapeutic function by which the objective or real world and one's relationship to it are reflected on and evaluated by the observer.
People who have delusions and paranoid thoughts (we say paranoid ideation) have impaired reality testing.
If President Donald Trump was just “Donald” to me, an ordinary client and he was behaving like this I would be alarmed, I would be consulting with my colleagues about whether he was on the verge of a psychotic episode, and whether or not involuntary inpatient psychiatric assessment was appropriate.
What does a psychotic break, or psychotic episode look like. To paraphrase Justice Potter Stewart (1964) to describe his threshold test for obscenity, you will know it when you see it. It will be so blatant that even Tucker Carlson won’t be able to B.S. his way into denying it.
Addendum:
Lot’s of people believe off-the-wall conspiracy theories. That the president is susceptible to believing them is alarming. Read: 5 Of The Wildest Conspiracy Theories YouTube Promoted In 2018. This latest one isn’t on the list since the article only covers last year.
Sunday, Aug 11, 2019 · 4:51:49 PM +00:00 · HalBrown
White House claims Trump just wants Epstein death investigated
However, according to the White House, Trump’s collapse into conspiracy wasn’t an effort to stoke his far-right conspiratorial base. Rather, according to presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s conspiracy theories are actually just a way of indicating that the president wants a thorough investigation of Epstein’s death.
In a Sunday morning appearance on Fox News, Conway defended Trump’s conspiracies, claiming that Trump “just wants everything to be investigated.”
Blast from the past, well, my story from July 23rd… about George and Kellyanne