Mental Health Experts Are Publicly Arguing About Whether Donald Trump Is Mentally Ill
Ethically speaking, mental health experts are supposed to refrain from publicly offering diagnoses for politicians. And so, for the most part, doctors and psychiatrists have refrained from joining in on the internet speculation that President Donald Trump has narcissistic personality disorder, dementia, or another condition.
But that changed in Tuesday's New York Times, in a very public way. A pair of letters — written originally in response to Charles Blow's scathing op-ed about the president — authored by prominent psychiatric experts faced off on the question of Trump's mental health.
The first, written by Dr. Lance Dodes and Dr. Joseph Schachter and signed by 33 other experts, asserts that Trump is unfit to lead the country given his mental state:
Mr. Trump's speech and actions demonstrate an inability to tolerate views different from his own, leading to rage reactions. His words and behavior suggest a profound inability to empathize. Individuals with these traits distort reality to suit their psychological state, attacking facts and those who convey them (journalists, scientists).
The latter, which was penned by Dr. Allen Frances (who literally wrote the criteria that define narcissistic personality disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV), sharply rebukes Dodes and Schacter's letter:
Most amateur diagnosticians have mislabeled President Trump with the diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder. I wrote the criteria that define this disorder, and Mr. Trump doesn't meet them. He may be a world-class narcissist, but this doesn't make him mentally ill, because he does not suffer from the distress and impairment required to diagnose mental disorder… His psychological motivations are too obvious to be interesting, and analyzing them will not halt his headlong power grab. The antidote to a dystopic Trumpean dark age is political, not psychological.
This isn't the first time that Dr. Frances has publicly denounced speculation about Trump having NPD, and in a previous article, he outlined why the speculation from doctors is dangerous:
The American Psychiatric Association has a useful ethics policy that explicitly prohibits the diagnosis of politicians at a distance. In the 1964 presidential election, liberal psychiatrists had taken cheap shot against the radically conservative Republican candidate, Barry Goldwater—publicizing their "diagnosis" that he was too mentally ill to be a safe custodian of the nuclear button. They had no right to use a professional credential to slur Goldwater in this way, medicalizing what was essentially no more than a political disagreement.
Speculation will undoubtedly continue on the internet, but the fact that the president's mental health is being debated in such public terms by experts is certainly something.