Signs Of Personality Or Mood Disorder
To any first-year psychiatric resident, Trumps 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 dont make someone unfit to be president. But President Trumps 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.
Norman Ornstein:Donald Trump has lost to Joe Biden, what’s next? The presidential transition from hell.
If we had a functioning Republican Party, this would be the time either to pressure the president to resign early and let Vice President Mike Pence handle the remainder of the term or to invoke the 25th Amendment. At minimum, we would hope that key figures, like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy and other senior officials, would act to embrace the reality of the election outcome and put constraints on Trump to stop destructive acts. Instead, they are enabling his worst instincts and behaviors.
Muzzling Its Members Is A Dereliction Of Duty By The American Psychiatric Association
In 1964, Fact magazine published an unscientific survey asking psychiatrists whether they thought the Republican nominee, Barry Goldwater, was psychologically fit to serve as president of the United States. The problem wasnt that professionals felt the need to share their views of what they considered Goldwaters dangerous ideas it was the irresponsible and often bizarre analyses that were in some cases based entirely on rank speculation. Goldwater is basically a paranoid schizophrenic who resembles Mao Tse-tung, one offered. Another said that he has the same pathological make-up as Hitler, Castro, Stalin and other known schizophrenic leaders. A third said that a megalomaniacal, grandiose omnipotence appears to pervade Mr. Goldwaters personality.
The American public is inadequately educated about mental health. It would take a serious, sustained explication, backed by the power and reach of a professional association, to help us understand why the emotional and psychological stability of our leaders matters and can have an impact on all of us. Every day legal experts weigh in on Donalds unconstitutional or norm-breaking behaviors. Since his covid-19 diagnosis, medical experts have speculated about the course of his illness and the potentially dangerous side effects he may be experiencing as a result of the experimental treatments hes received. Only the mental health experts have been effectively sidelined.
A Dark New Family History From Donald Trumps Niece May Be The Most Intimate Psychological Portrait Of Him Yet
Diagnosing Donald Trump with any number of psychological defects has become an armchair sport. Despite guidelines prohibiting psychiatrists from diagnosing patients they have not personally examined, many in the mental health field have gotten in on the action. They have said Trump has narcissistic personality disorder, malignant narcissism, a profound lack of empathy. Others have theorized that Trump is incapacitated by drug addiction, dementia, or even syphilis. But even though the wall between the president and the people has never been thinnercreating a situation in which Trump perpetually seems to be on the proverbial couchthese diagnoses are inevitably hampered by speculation.
Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the Worlds Most Dangerous Man presents itself as the first genuine psychological portrait of Trump by a person who knows him well. It is written by the presidents niece, Mary L. Trump, who not only has the firsthand experience with the president and his family that his would-be shrinks lack, but is also herself a clinical psychologist by training.
And Mary is not shy about diagnosing her uncle. Too Much and Never Enough is full of explanations for Trumps behavior: abandonment issues, narcissism , stunted emotional growth, caffeine dependence. All of these have combined to form a 74-year-old toddler who just happens to be the most powerful person on the planet.
Alex Shephard is a staff writer at The New Republic.
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Schumer Slams Republicans: They Played A Risky And Partisan Game
Here’s a fact you may have missed amid all of the coverage of the allegations and revelations in the new book by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa: The top general in the country believed that President Donald Trump was in significant enough mental decline that he took countermeasures to ensure Trump didn’t start a war with China on his way out the door.
“Woodward and Costa write that Milley, deeply shaken by the assault, ‘was certain that Trump had gone into a serious mental decline in the aftermath of the election, with Trump now all but manic, screaming at officials and constructing his own alternate reality about endless election conspiracies.’“Milley worried that Trump could ‘go rogue,’ the authors write.“‘You never know what a president’s trigger point is,’ Milley told his senior staff,”“The book details a private call McCarthy had with Trump the night before Biden’s inauguration. According to Woodward and Costa, McCarthy told Trump, ‘I don’t know what’s happened to you in the last two months. … You’re not the same as you were for the last four years.’“McCarthy then repeatedly pleaded with Trump to call Biden.“‘You’ve done good things and you want that to be your legacy. Call Joe Biden,’ McCarthy said, according to the authors.
Dynamics And Structure Of Pathological Narcissism
Narcissism has a long and ambiguous history . In diagnostic and colloquial terms, narcissism is often understood in terms of grandiosity, inflated self-esteem, and feeling entitled and superior to others . However, perhaps a more accurate and clinically informed view is that narcissism is a process. In this process, the grandiosity characteristic of narcissism functions as a defense against feelings of vulnerability, inferiority, and generally not being good enough . Although some have argued that narcissism is a normal aspect of development , it becomes pathological when it causes disruption in the lives of the narcissistic person and/or those around them.
Narcissistic grandiosity and vulnerability are multifaceted dimensions that manifest in different ways . Grandiosity varies in degrees of severity from excessive and unwarranted self-esteem to delusions of grandeur it varies in form from arrogance and entitlement to gratuitous need for attention to Machiavellian exploitation of and willful aggression towards others reminiscent of psychopathy . These latter, sadistic variants of grandiosity entail a lack of empathy for other people and may be referred as malignant narcissism . Vulnerability may manifest as hypersensitivity to criticism, emotional lability, masochistic tendency to sacrifice oneself, and/or affinity for and admiration of others of higher status.
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So Does Donald Trump Have A Personality Disorder
As a psychiatrist it is not good practice for me to make a diagnosis on someone who I havent clinically examined. So while I wont commit to a diagnosis in this article let me leave you with the following
Criteria for considering if a diagnosis of Personality Disorder is present include:
Does the individuals way of thinking, experiencing emotions, ability to control impulses and need for gratification and way of relating to others, manifest in a wide range of personal and social situations?
Criteria for considering the specific diagnosis of Narcissistic Personality Disorder:
A pervasive pattern of grandiosity , need for admiration, and lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by five of the following:
Most Astounding Accusations In Mary Trumps Book
Donald Trump has failed us because he is, as he has always been, incompetent, and he suffers from extremely severe mental disorders, which render him incapable of attending to any issue beyond his own personal need for adulation.
The mental condition he suffers most from is formally known as a severe instance of narcissistic personality disorder, he added.
Dr Zinner said that the disorder is the failure in childhood and beyond to develop an inner sense of worth or self-esteem, and added that it makes ones worth entirely dependent upon admiration from others.
In 2017, Dr Zinner claimed that the presidents mental health posed an existential threat to the world as he has the ability to launch nuclear weapons at any time.
has a particular kind of character thats very well known, especially by psychoanalytically orientated mental health people, Dr Zinner said about the president in 2017.
What it involves is a fundamental self-esteem problem an insecure self-esteem, side by side with a sense of grandiosity. So the person has a very contradictory image of themselves, he added.
Dr Zinner did not diagnose the president with anything specific in 2017, but he is now among 37 other mental health professionals who have speculated on the state of Mr Trumps mental health, following the release ofThe Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President, edited by Dr Lee.
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So Is It Appropriate For Mental Health Professionals To Proclaim That President Trump Is Mentally Ill
President Trump clearly displays publicly observable off-putting behaviors. One does not have to be a therapist, for instance, to judge that when President Trump speaks harshly about other political figures he is violating American norms for appropriate public, or even private, behavior.
At the same time, unattractive and culturally frowned-upon habits do not constitute mental illness. And someone who has managed well enough to get himself elected as President of the United States is clearly functional.
Do You Agree With What She’s Written About The President
Miller: ” I agree entirely. ‘Prototypical’ doesn’t describe the degree to which meets the criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Many of us who study it say that if we other peer reviewers would say, ‘You’ve made up too cartoonish of a case.’ They wouldn’t believe it would be possible. That’s how incredibly well he fits those symptoms. I’ve viewed Donald Trump as an example of narcissism going back 15 years. Long before he was running for president, long before he was associated with the Republican Party. Literally, going back into the mid-2000s at academic talks he was one of the pictures I would put up. This is hardly new. Narcissism is associated with aggression, in general, and specifically under an ego-threat. When someone has criticized you, we’re going to see lashing out. An inability to accept blame it’s always someone else’s fault. To not admit one’s mistakes …that inability to admit that one has ever been wrong is a really huge problem. I agree that we should not be distracted by his narcissism from his psychopathy. Search for the criteria for psychopathy. Look at traits and behaviours in the psychopathy checklist written by Hare. Grapple with how many would he not fit there. And psychopathy is associated much more strongly than narcissism with behaviours that are particularly scary. It’s the callousness, irresponsibility, impulse-control problems, lack of remorse or shame.”
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How Can People Cope With Anxiety About Politics
The campaign and election of President Trump led counselors, clinicians, and life coaches to report that their clients were developing anxiety, depression, paranoia, hypervigilance, intrusive thoughts, difficulty concentrating, trouble sleeping, and nightmares. The intense political anxieties also altered how mental health professionals practice: In striking contrast to decades of precedent, some therapists now choose to make their political opinions known to their clients.
In addition to exploring specific concerns in therapy, skills for coping with election anxiety include joining communities that reaffirm your personal values, reaching out to friends and family for support, writing down different possibilities and the probability of each one actually occurring, journaling, exercising, and appreciating your resilience by recalling past experiences of adversity.
Is It Ethically Permissible To Write What Mary Trump Wrote
Josh Miller, a clinical psychologist and director of clinical training at the University of Georgia, defended the author: “Does the Goldwater rule apply to psychologists, and does it make a great deal of sense in the modern day?… I think we sometimes privilege the idea that you can only make a diagnosis if you’re treating a patient. But psychiatrists make diagnoses after one 50-minute session, or three, or four, all the time. We surely all have much more information on Donald Trump at this point in time than a mental-health professional would after somewhere between 50 and 200 minutes. Then, a family member I think clearly has much more information than a mental-health professional ever would. The ethics? I don’t know I personally fall into the category that there is a duty to warn about potentially the most important person in the world and whether they have a pattern of personality traits that portend quite poorly.”
So did Donald Lynam, a distinguished professor of clinical psychology at Purdue University: “I don’t have a real problem with a trained professional who has access to lots of behavioural data on a person making an assessment like this. I personally think that there is more than enough longitudinal life-history data available on many persons in the public eye that would enable professionals to make such assessments. I think Trump is no exception. He has always been a very public figure. Many books and stories have been written about his behaviour.”
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Trump’s Mental Health And Why People Are Discussing It
It is a question that has dogged Donald Trump – fairly or otherwise – since he was elected president: is he mentally fit for office?
The question has been raised again by the release of a new book by New York journalist Michael Wolff, which chronicles the first year of the Trump White House.
The book – the accuracy of which has been disputed by the White House and queried by others – paints the president as impatient and unable to focus, prone to rambling and repeating himself.
Mr Trump has hit back against Mr Wolff’s account, claiming on Twitter to be a “very stable genius” whose “two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart”.
But the president’s manner and speaking style have led to armchair diagnoses of a host of ailments, from Alzheimer’s to narcissistic personality disorder – a controversial practice that has divided the medical profession.
….Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart. Crooked Hillary Clinton also played these cards very hard and, as everyone knows, went down in flames. I went from VERY successful businessman, to top T.V. Star…..
Donald J. Trump
….to President of the United States . I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius….and a very stable genius at that!
Donald J. Trump
