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Trump's mental health and temperament have been a concern from the moment he declared his interest in running for president. Mental health professionals in particular have been raising red flags on his flagrant narcissism and tenuous relationship with facts from the beginning. But even those who are not mental health professionals always knew there was something not quite right about his outsized personality.
Analysts have focused specifically on the applicability of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, which the Mayo Clinic defines by “an inflated sense of [one’s] own importance, a deep need for admiration and a lack of empathy for others. But behind this mask of ultra-confidence lies a fragile self-esteem that’s vulnerable to the slightest criticism." The outcomes of even slight criticisms in such individuals can be extremely violent, exaggerated, and often unpredictable, with the critics often facing draconian consequences. One psychologist, Ben Michaelis, called Trump “textbook Narcissistic Personality Disorder.” Psychologist George Simon called Trump “so classic that I’m archiving video clips of him to use in my classes and workshops because there’s no better or classic example of this disorder.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/07/trump-and-sociopathy/491966/
But mental health specialists have been averse to speaking out about Trump's "strangeness" because of an old rule they themselves made. Ever since 1973, they have been professionally restrained by something called the Goldwater Rule from commenting on the mental fitness of any person they have not personally examined. Because the rule was established by the American Psychiatric Association (who are MDs-medical doctors), psychologists (who have PhDs) are not expressly forbidden from making public pronouncements about the mental health of public figures. But the American Psychological Association has also affirmed the rule and psychologists generally abide by it.
In recent years, however, especially since the Trump candidacy, mental health experts have begun speaking out against the rule. For psychologist John Gartner, who has over 41,000 professional signatures to a Facebook petition stating that mental health experts have a duty to warn the public of the dangers posed by Trump’s behavior, the rule is obsolete, established before diagnostic criteria abandoned Freudian interpretation in favor of observable behavior.
This has now become a professional dilemma for mental health specialists: do they just let democracy take their course ("We are not the police for society, we just have a responsibility to the individual patient who seeks our services", as one of the few opposed to this view stated at the conference), or should they have an ethical responsibility to society at large to educate them about a clearly very odd and abnormal behavior, with potentially very dangerous consequences? This is a little like the dilemma they face when a patient confides in them that they are going to kill someone or plant a bomb somewhere. Do they violate doctor/patient confidentiality to warn the potential victim or police, or does the privacy of their client come first? Are there times when their duty to society at large should outweigh their professional obligations to an individual patient?
Analysts have focused specifically on the applicability of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, which the Mayo Clinic defines by “an inflated sense of [one’s] own importance, a deep need for admiration and a lack of empathy for others. But behind this mask of ultra-confidence lies a fragile self-esteem that’s vulnerable to the slightest criticism." The outcomes of even slight criticisms in such individuals can be extremely violent, exaggerated, and often unpredictable, with the critics often facing draconian consequences. One psychologist, Ben Michaelis, called Trump “textbook Narcissistic Personality Disorder.” Psychologist George Simon called Trump “so classic that I’m archiving video clips of him to use in my classes and workshops because there’s no better or classic example of this disorder.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/07/trump-and-sociopathy/491966/
But mental health specialists have been averse to speaking out about Trump's "strangeness" because of an old rule they themselves made. Ever since 1973, they have been professionally restrained by something called the Goldwater Rule from commenting on the mental fitness of any person they have not personally examined. Because the rule was established by the American Psychiatric Association (who are MDs-medical doctors), psychologists (who have PhDs) are not expressly forbidden from making public pronouncements about the mental health of public figures. But the American Psychological Association has also affirmed the rule and psychologists generally abide by it.
In recent years, however, especially since the Trump candidacy, mental health experts have begun speaking out against the rule. For psychologist John Gartner, who has over 41,000 professional signatures to a Facebook petition stating that mental health experts have a duty to warn the public of the dangers posed by Trump’s behavior, the rule is obsolete, established before diagnostic criteria abandoned Freudian interpretation in favor of observable behavior.
This has now become a professional dilemma for mental health specialists: do they just let democracy take their course ("We are not the police for society, we just have a responsibility to the individual patient who seeks our services", as one of the few opposed to this view stated at the conference), or should they have an ethical responsibility to society at large to educate them about a clearly very odd and abnormal behavior, with potentially very dangerous consequences? This is a little like the dilemma they face when a patient confides in them that they are going to kill someone or plant a bomb somewhere. Do they violate doctor/patient confidentiality to warn the potential victim or police, or does the privacy of their client come first? Are there times when their duty to society at large should outweigh their professional obligations to an individual patient?
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