One of us is a psychiatrist, the other a political scientist. We have watched the fiasco since the e******n with mounting trepidation, from two very different perspectives. But we have a common bond: For more than a decade, each of us has worked to advocate for people with serious mental illness to get treatment. We are coming together now to advocate for immediate intervention for our president.
Since President Donald Trump’s e******n, the psychiatric community has debated calling out his illness(es). The American Psychiatric Association says we should remain silent out of fear that we would violate the Goldwater Rule — an APA rule adopted largely to prevent the partisan misuse of psychiatric diagnoses to unduly influence an e******n. But it is clear what many psychiatrists know privately, and a few have said publicly. The threat to our democracy is too great to remain silent.
Not just tantrums or selfishness
It may be no surprise that Trump railed against a 2020 e******n process that promised a major increase in turnout through early v****g and v****g by mail. He and many Republicans have advocated for ways to suppress v**es, and suggested repeatedly that when everybody v**es, Republicans lose. Remember, Trump had said before the 2016 e******n that if he lost, it was r****d; if he won, it was fair.
It also may be no surprise that Trump denied the outcome of the 2020 e******n in the days that followed it, despite the fact that President-elect Joe Biden’s margins in battlegrounds Michigan and Pennsylvania were larger than Trump's four years ago and he flipped Arizona and Georgia to the Democratic column. And it is true that there is neither a legal nor constitutional requirement for a p**********l candidate to concede when he has lost.
But Trump's behavior since is antithetical to every norm we have in a democracy that values as much as anything the legitimacy of e******ns and the peaceful and orderly t******r of p***r after v**ers have spoken.
The president’s actions — ordering his minions to deny all the elements of a t***sition to the president-elect, including access to intelligence and p******c briefings, access to agencies to plan the next administration, access to the FBI to begin security clearances for incoming appointees — are not just wrongheaded, they are dangerous to the security and health of the American people.
The president’s moves to fire key officials, including those in charge of the safety of our nuclear stockpile and those in charge of our national security, suggest that the loyalty test — loyalty to the president and not to the Constitution — is going to be applied more often, hollowing out our p******c teams and intelligence and defense capabilities, and leaving in charge a group of sycophants willing to do his bidding in his remaining weeks in office. The fact that he has not attended a meeting on the p******c in months and has barely mentioned it as it explodes across the country is another sign of alarm.
Many say that Trump's refusal to agree to a peaceful and orderly concession is just a threat from a selfish man who can’t accept defeat. President-elect Biden calls Trump’s failure to concede an “embarrassment.” It is worse. When someone says they are planning their suicide, mental health professionals don’t call it a “cry for attention.” They hospitalize them immediately to prevent harm. When someone threatens homicide, violence or child abuse, we act swiftly to protect potential victims. It is naïve to consider the current acts of President Trump as childish tantrums and nothing more than fodder for late night comedians.
Signs of personality or mood disorder
To any first-year psychiatric resident, Trump’s sleepless nights filled with ranting tweets suggest irrational exuberance and lack of control, possibly a sign of a mood disorder called hypomania. His life-long history of disregard for others and deceit, if correct as reported, are characteristic of a personality disorder on the narcissistic and even sociopathic spectrum.
To be sure, definitive psychiatric diagnoses cannot be made without an in-person examination And certainly, psychiatric diagnoses themselves don’t make someone unfit to be president. But President Trump’s particular history and actions create a high index of suspicion for destructive mental processes which are putting the country and its safety and security in jeopardy.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-history-behavior-suggest-destructive-081511137.htmlOne of us is a psychiatrist, the other a political... (