![]() The book exists to change the course of the public’s conversation around Trump’s mental health, from a dialogue centered on diatribes calling him childish or a clown to one that centers his perpetuation of “malignant normality.” Introduced in the foreword by Robert Jay Lifton, one of America’s leading psychohistorians, the term signifies the dangers of normalizing a president who lies and makes bombastic or joking statements about nuclear weapons, for instance. ![]() We shouldn’t alter our message to placate those who are unwell because they’re already on a course that is self-destructive.” When asked whether or not the book aims to persuade #MAGA believers, Lee said, “They may be beyond convincing. (Trump’s brand of denialism doesn’t warrant Twitter attention to those with the letters PhD after their name.) Lee said that criticisms have come mostly over email from people who couldn’t put a coherent sentence together. The book has not yet been trolled by the #MAGA audience or the phony #MAGA bots. In writing the book, Lee and her colleagues were “not so much deterred by the Goldwater rule as we were by fear of being targeted by a litigious president or some of his violence prone followers.” The “duty to warn” is how these experts claim to evade the American Psychiatric Association’s “Goldwater rule,” which states that “it is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement.” Lee says the lines are blurred when the stakes are this high, when there is a “serious mental instability impacting the public sphere.” They have a duty to the public, not just individual patients. And we as a profession are late in sounding the warnings." We sound an alarm when there’s risk of harm. “We have a moral and civic duty to warn and to protect the public. What it's really about "is pointing out the danger,” which is different from making a diagnosis, Lee said. In every chapter, the authors cop to the impossibility of definitively diagnosing the president without clinical interviews. "We sound an alarm when there’s risk of harm. “They’re usually in jail or prisons,” the settings where she mostly works. “But they’re usually not in positions of power,” she said. Lee said she has seen thousands of individuals like Trump in her years of work at the intersection of violence prevention and psychology. In the book, Philip Zimbardo, of the Stanford prison study, writes that Trump has a “specific personality type: an unbridled, or extreme, present hedonist” and “narcissist.” John Gartner, a 28-year veteran psychologist at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, outlines how Trump is a “malignant narcissist” and “evinces the most destructive and dangerous collection of psychiatric symptoms possible for a leader.” Retired Harvard psychiatry professor Lance Dodes writes that Trump’s “sociopathic characteristics are undeniable."ĭon't give him too much credit. ![]() ![]() Their assessment spans Trump's life with a focus on his campaign and the early months of his tenure (taunting North Korea will have to be added if Lee and company ever update epilogue). ![]() This book is their response, and it holds nothing back.Īssembled are the country’s heavy-hitters in the field of psychology to break down the president’s personality traits, which they find consistent with narcissistic personality disorder, sociopathy, paranoia, hypomania, and other illnesses. The experts recognized that Trump is not the first president to harbor symptoms of mental illness-a 2006 study found that roughly half of our past presidents likely suffered from mental illness-but he's the first to pose a significant threat requiring action. Lee organizing a ethics conference that explored Trump's mental health and how psychiatry experts should respond. You might recall news from earlier this year of Dr. Edited by Professor Bandy Lee, a forensic psychiatrist at the Yale School of Medicine, the book introduces 27 psychiatrists and mental health experts who make the case that “anyone as mentally unstable as this man should not be entrusted with the life-and-death-powers of the presidency.” Its impact might amount to conscience-clearing, but a deeper look reveals a new way to discuss just how volatile Trump and the American way of life has become. But with the release of a new book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, these thin notions around the president’s instability are fortified for the first time, invigorating the probes surrounding the mental health of the president. ![]()
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