By Rosemary K.M. Sword and Philip Zimbardo Ph.D.
On
February 28, we published a post, "The Elephant in
the Room: It’s time we talked openly about Donald Trump’s mental health,"
which went viral with close to a million reads. People on both sides of the
political spectrum—as well as some mental health professionals—weighed in with hundreds of
comments.
One
comment was from Hal Brown, MSW, a colleague of John Gartner, Ph.D., whom we
mentioned in the post. John is the founder of Duty to Warn, an organization intent on
warning our country that we are in dire trouble due to our president’s mental
instability. More than 60,000 mental health professionals have signed John’s
petition, which states:
“We, the undersigned
mental health professionals, believe in our professional judgment that Donald Trump manifests a serious mental illness that
renders him psychologically incapable of competently discharging the duties of
President of the United States. And we respectfully request he be removed from
office, according to article 4 of the 25th amendment to the Constitution, which
states that the president will be replaced if he is ‘unable to discharge the
powers and duties of his office.’”
John
requested an interview with Phil for a podcast and then asked him to
participate in a short documentary film that was recently released. So far,
nearly 2 million people have viewed the documentary.
Bandy Lee
In
mid-March, we received an email from Bandy X. Lee of Yale University. To give
you a little of her amazing background, she is an M.D.; M.Div. (Master of
Divinity); assistant clinical professor, Yale Law and Psychiatry Division;
co-founder and director of the Violence and Health Study Group for the
MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies; as well as co-leader of Academic Collaborators for the World Health
Organization’s Violence Prevention Alliance. We were honored, and a little
scared, when she asked us to contribute to a new book she was putting together,
with the working title, Duty
to Warn. The book was time-sensitive in that she, other
contributors, and interested publishers felt an urgency to get the book into
the hands of the public and governmental powers-that-be as soon possible. We
had less than a month to send our essay to her.
All
other projects were sidelined as we devoted the next two weeks to researching
and writing. Fortunately, we had "The
Elephant" as an outline and our time perspective expertise in observing
Trump’s extreme present hedonistic behavior to help us determine our findings.
As we dug deeper into the fallout of Trump as president, we became increasingly
alarmed by how one person
can affect an entire nation. We used this newfound knowledge for our book
chapter, as well as two subsequent PsychogyToday.com post: "The Trump Effect,
Part I," about the increase in bullying in schools and a small adult population across
the U.S. since the 2016 presidential campaign; and "Part II," about
the increase in sexual harassment incidents.
A Question of Ethics
Whether
or not mental health professionals should discuss, much less diagnose, a person
they have not personally interviewed was the conundrum faced by Bandy and other
contributors to her book. In the post, "Shrinks Battle
Over Diagnosing Donald Trump: Chaos in the White House fuels discord amongst
the experts," on January 31, Psychology
Today editor-at-large Hara Estroff Marano brought to light
“...three significant and intertwined issues. Can Donald Trump or any public
figure be deemed to have mental illness, even based on specific,
well-publicized criteria reflecting observable behavior? Is it ethical or
appropriate for mental health professionals to venture into public acts of
diagnosis? Is psychology a suitable instrument for addressing issues of
governance?”
In
that post, Gartner responds that the current DSM: Version 5 places pathology
(the study of the nature of diseases; something abnormal) in the realm of
the observable (to watch carefully especially with attention to details or
behavior for the purpose of arriving at a judgment).
As
Estroff Marano pointed out, “It is widely regarded as unethical—a violation of
the so-called Goldwater Rule—for mental health experts to offer a professional
diagnosis of any person they have not personally examined. The rule was
established in 1973 by the American Psychiatric Association and is still in force today.
Although psychologists are not expressly forbidden from making public
pronouncements about the mental health of public figures, the American
Psychological Association has affirmed the rule and psychologists generally
abide by it.”
Gartner
speaks for the book contributors as well as the 60,000-plus mental health
professionals who signed his petition when he contends that the mental health
community has an obligation to
protect the public that overrides the Goldwater Rule —we’ve advanced quite a
lot in 44 years—and that Trump has proved himself a clear and present danger.
Also, the Goldwater Rule is not relevant because it was established before the
DSM made diagnosis behaviorally based.
Please
continue this article here: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-time-cure/201709/the-dangerous-case-donald-trump
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