I wanted to share this illustration and caption (click to enlarge with caption included) which I made without feeling one moment of guilt. Then I read a story on Salon about why you shouldn’t feel guilty about dark thoughts about Trump’s illness. It was so much like mine that I admit I wished I’d been quoted.
This diary is includes a link to what I wrote on Oct. 2nd. It is also a personal lament. It is a sob story. Call me a narcissist if you will, but I do have a modicum of pride. Do I have ambitions for further celebrity? Perhaps I do. So kill me…
The most important thing I want everyone to understand is that there’s no reason for feeling guilty when you wish the worst for Donald Trump and the likes of Stephen Miller, Rudy Giuliani, and William Barr.
Root for them swimming with the Covid sharks wearing their (presidential seal) seal suits. I do.
by Hal Brown, MSW
Salon published this story today. It more or less mirrored what I said in my own diary a few days ago:
Feeling guilty about wishing Trump ill? Therapists say it's a normal reaction to being disempowered — Schadenfreude towards the president is a "normal" response to those who've been hurt by him, therapists say. By Nicole Karlis.
On October 2nd I wrote:
As a therapist I want to remind you not to feel guilty if you have dark thoughts about Trump
On the personal side, my initial reaction was to read the article to see if I was quoted.
Alas, and boo-hoo, Salon interviewed only two therapists both of whom were unknown to me. One was a social worker who specializes with working with people going through divorce and breakups and the other a marriage an family counselor with a similar specialty. The former went to Widner University and the later to Pepperdine for their masters degrees. I went to Michigan State for my MSW.
Why couldn’t the author have called me? After all if you look up my name with Trump this is what you find. If you look them up all you find is this the Salon article they are quoted in.
Once again, my fame as an expert on Trump’s psychopathology anywhere else than on Daily Kos (which I truly appreciate) has eluded me. What a blow to my fragile ego!
I am still waiting a call from Lawrence O’Donnell’s show.
Here are some of the best known (call them eminent) mental health professionals in the media about Trump (aside from Mary Trump):
Founder of Duty to Warn John D. Garner, PhD, editor of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump Bandy Lee, MD, Mdiv, Robert Jay Lifton, MD, who is well known for his studies of the psychological causes and effects of wars and political violence, and for his theory of thought reform, Lance Dodes, MD, psychologists Alan D. Blotcky and Seth D. Norrholm, Phillip Zimbardo of the Stanford prison experiment, Rosemary Sword, David Reiss, MD, all the contributors to The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump and others.