Last night I watched Rachel Maddow and once again she avoided getting into any depth about Trump’s psychopathology. She expressed puzzlement about why his behavior is so erratic yet she won’t have any experts on to enlighten her the way she does when there are legal issues to discuss.
On the other hand her colleague, who is on in the next hour on MSNBC, was the first host on the network to have mental health professionals on his show. He had Dr. John Gartner, founder of the Duty to Warn group (full disclosure, I was an early member) and Dr. Lance Dodes on the show. He had Dr. Bandy X. Lee, the editor of “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump” on his show. Dodes was interviewed by O’Donnell again last week. To her credit Joy Reid also had Dodes on over the weekend.
Online Salon’s Chauncey DeVega covers Trump’s psychopathology in depth interviewing the best known mental health professionals speaking out about Trump including most recently psychoanalyst Justin Frank.
The unfiltered blunt Rick Wilson doesn’t use psychiatric terms in today’s NY Daily News article “The great crackup: Trump is coming even more undone” but he does end with this:
….Trump’s performance left people both inside and out of the political class wondering about the president’s sanity and fitness for office.
Most states have some form of involuntary commitment law for people who are a danger to themselves and others. In my home state of Florida, it’s called the Baker Act, and I’ve seen it applied to run of the mill folks up to state legislators. It only takes a competent family member and one other adult to get the ball rolling on Baker Acting someone. So I’m thinking about Trump’s next visit to Mar-A-Lago.
Maddow is but one example of what Brian Stelter writes about in The hardest Trump story for the press to cover: His fitness for the job.
Stelter writes:
- Are members of the news media tiptoeing around obvious questions about Trump's instability? What do the daily lies, distortions and contradictions add up to?
- This is a story that's playing out every day on our TV screens and Twitter feeds. We can all see it happening, but it's a very hard and very sensitive story to cover.
- That's the challenge for national news outlets. All of these stories are covered in the moment, individually, by reporters who use words like erratic, volatile and unstable to describe Trump. But rarely are the words and actions covered in their totality.
- There is an understandable aversion to diagnosing a person — any person — based on what's only visible on television and Twitter.
- Quoting a Wall Street Journal article: "But," she said, "I don't need a diagnosis to know that the symptoms are pretty worrying."
Stelter ends with:
There are legitimate ethical questions about having this conversation. Journalists in newsrooms like The AP and CNN are trained to tread very carefully when entering the realm of speculation. The goal is to gather facts, not advance a political agenda.
But there are ways to cover the fact pattern around Trump and his actions that are reportorial, not political, in nature. Some writers and TV anchors are already doing it. By all means, let's debate the ethics. But the press shouldn't tiptoe around this story anymore.
.
Dr. Lee made her points with grace and erudition in a manner far more compelling than Dr. Francis did with his pompous insults which were unconscionably unprofessional and Trump-like.
.
Here’s what isn’t speculation: the fact of the matter is that there are so many mental heath professionals who have gone public about how and why Donald Trump demonstrates so many signs he is mentally unfit to be president that he should be immediately assessed by a panel of unbiased professionals that I do not think anyone should feel the need to give Allen Francis a platform.
.
In my opinion, to put it mildly, Dr. Francis is such an outlier that having him interviewed is akin to finding the one scientist who doesn’t believe climate change is a result of human activity to debate another scientist who believes it is.
Full disclosure: Dr. Francis and I exchanged emails in Sept. 2017 and he declined to get into a dialogue with me about our disagreements.
I understand the need to add balance to an interview when there are opposing views held by about the same number of people. However Francis's is an isolated voice among mental health professionals, in fact he may be the only one of note who has taken his position.
.
Francis says that diagnosis of Trump stigmatizes those who truly suffer from psychiatric disorders. This is not true. People are smarter than that.
Asking whether the problem is with Trump of the people who voted for him all distracts from the point that Trump is dangerous because of his psychopathology. Saying that the focus on those who elected him, while important in another context, is also a distraction from the issue the authors who contributed to "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump" and many other mental health professionals like myself have gone public warning about.
Trump is dangerously unstable and every day he remains in office keeps us at risk of a more dangerous expression of his rage and or his ignorance then merely an angry tweet.
The media has to avail themselves of resources available to them to help understand the psychological reasons which provide explanations his behavior. All they have to do is go through the
table of contents of "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump." Most of the contributions are by mental health professionals who can easily be reached.