Cont: Donald Trump has 'dangerous mental illness' say psychiatry experts at Yale... Pt 3

And a system structured so that the rest of us must wait years for an election to oust (and no guarantee there, either) the bastard(s) points to the societal abdication of a means for more immediate redress. Impeachment? Hasn't worked yet (Nixon quit because shame in politics had not yet died). The 25th? As if.
Nixon had so little approval he would have been impeached. To get rid of a sitting President before his term is up, you pretty much need a supermajority of opinion against him. Otherwise you just have the British system where the Prime Minister serves at the pleasure of Parliament. No President who didn't have Congress on his side would be safe. This seems like a recipe for ratcheting up the tribal warfare.
 
"It's just peachy for our President to promulgate unfounded conspiracy theories and demonstrate his replacing fantasy with reality, but God forbid a qualified mental health professional should raise a concern about this without conducting an in-person assessment."
 
"It's just peachy for our President to promulgate unfounded conspiracy theories and demonstrate his replacing fantasy with reality, but God forbid a qualified mental health professional should raise a concern about this without conducting an in-person assessment."

Perhaps Trump's madness is contagious, so any professional who gets close enough to examine him will become mad themselves, and thus be unqualified to render a professional opinion!
 
That isn’t a prediction, it’s an observation of what is currently happening.

Besides, anyone paying attention could have predicted how Trump would act or that he would bungle the response. Labels like, “NPD” or “malignant narcissism,” or “dangerously mentally ill,” were completely unnecessary for such predictions.
:rolleyes:

And why is it that "anyone paying attention could have predicted how Trump would act"?

Could it be because Trump cannot help himself?

He imagines COVID is going away because he wants it to be gone. It isn't and these attempts to ignore it will backfire as numbers of cases start rising.

He'll blame that on more testing and he'll continue to believe his fantasy, the disease is going away.

He'll claim it was the governors' doing and they didn't follow Trump's guidelines.

Having two contradictory beliefs at the same time is common for Trump.

Trump is ending Fauci and Birx from being in press conferences reminding the public Trump's version of reality is a fantasy.
 
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"It's just peachy for our President to promulgate unfounded conspiracy theories and demonstrate his replacing fantasy with reality, but God forbid a qualified mental health professional should raise a concern about this without conducting an in-person assessment."

This ^

Are you quoting someone?
 
:rolleyes:

And why is it that "anyone paying attention could have predicted how Trump would act"?
Because you don’t need a diagnosis to observe someone and make predictions about their behavior.

Could it be because Trump cannot help himself?
Maybe, but it’s an irrelevant factor. Doesn’t matter if he can or can’t help himself, what matters is what he actually does.

He imagines COVID is going away because he wants it to be gone. It isn't and these attempts to ignore it will backfire as numbers of cases start rising.
Again, the internal mental state that leads to his actions doesn’t matter. What matters are the actions he takes. We can guess that he will be bad at managing a pandemic because we’ve seen him being bad at managing everything else, going back to his businesses. If he can’t keep a friggin’ casino open, I mean jeez, what can he do? Who he is and what he does is far more important to us as voters than why he does it.

He'll blame that on more testing and he'll continue to believe his fantasy, the disease is going away.

He'll claim it was the governors' doing and they didn't follow Trump's guidelines.

Having two contradictory beliefs at the same time is common for Trump.
And common for many of us as well. It isn’t a sign of mental illness, though.
 
That isn’t a prediction, it’s an observation of what is currently happening.

Besides, anyone paying attention could have predicted how Trump would act or that he would bungle the response. Labels like, “NPD” or “malignant narcissism,” or “dangerously mentally ill,” were completely unnecessary for such predictions.


Yes, when mental disorders are this obvious, labels are unnecessary. (By the way, nothing is easier to diagnose at a distance than mental disorders. Disorders of the body usually require hands-on diagnostics.)
 
And common for many of us as well. It isn’t a sign of mental illness, though.


It's a question of degree. Most people may exhibit small signs of narcissism occasionally. Trump exhibits them all, and he does so all the time. They have been posted in this thread several times already.
 
Because you don’t need a diagnosis to observe someone and make predictions about their behavior.
How is this relevant to professionals weighing in using their professional credentials?

Maybe, but it’s an irrelevant factor. Doesn’t matter if he can or can’t help himself, what matters is what he actually does.

Again, the internal mental state that leads to his actions doesn’t matter. What matters are the actions he takes. We can guess that he will be bad at managing a pandemic because we’ve seen him being bad at managing everything else, going back to his businesses. If he can’t keep a friggin’ casino open, I mean jeez, what can he do? Who he is and what he does is far more important to us as voters than why he does it.
No, that he cannot help himself is because of his diagnosis.

And common for many of us as well. It isn’t a sign of mental illness, though.
:rolleyes:
 
Yes, when mental disorders are this obvious, labels are unnecessary. (By the way, nothing is easier to diagnose at a distance than mental disorders. Disorders of the body usually require hands-on diagnostics.)


The American Psychiatric Association disagrees with you.
 
Trump still thinks he's on reality TV:
Trump claimed Wednesday that he did, in fact, wear a mask during a visit to a mask production facility in Arizona on Tuesday — but that he did so “backstage.”
....
“I had it on back, backstage,” Trump said. When a reporter noted that members of the media did not observe Trump wearing the mask, the president replied, “I can’t help it if you didn’t see me.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nati...us-update-us/#link-3MXRML5MFNADDNDT4V2XYAOQQE [several items down]
 
This ^

Are you quoting someone?

No one in particular. I was channeling the generic Trump apologist's attitude.

Highlighting the way they and their Chosen One eschew, decry and ignore science when inconvenient and uncomfortable, but then demand that only the most rigorous science be employed by the Emperor's detractors.
 
The APA is claiming that the Yale docs need to keep their mouths shut, not that they're wrong.

They have made it clear that "remote diagnosis" is not a valid form of psychiatry.
 
At this juncture I don't care a whit about knowing what mental factors go into his actions. About *why* his "a-brain" short-circuits and misfires the way it does. His actions and their consequences all by themselves tell us all we need to know. He's not just unfit. He's dangerously so.

A body of political scientists rated him as the worst President a couple years back. Worse by far than Nixon, who had to scarper outta town because he was gonna be convicted in his impeachment trial. And who himself HAS ALREADY BEEN IMPEACHED. And since then the evidence of his malignant unfitness and criminality has only piled on.

To hell with arguing *why* Trump is *****. The fact that he *is* ***** is enough to know. We can leave the "why" 'til after he's sent packing.
 
At this juncture I don't care a whit about knowing what mental factors go into his actions. About *why* his "a-brain" short-circuits and misfires the way it does. His actions and their consequences all by themselves tell us all we need to know. He's not just unfit. He's dangerously so.

A body of political scientists rated him as the worst President a couple years back. Worse by far than Nixon, who had to scarper outta town because he was gonna be convicted in his impeachment trial. And who himself HAS ALREADY BEEN IMPEACHED. And since then the evidence of his malignant unfitness and criminality has only piled on.

To hell with arguing *why* Trump is *****. The fact that he *is* ***** is enough to know. We can leave the "why" 'til after he's sent packing.
Maybe the Dean of Harvard should vet all future presidential candidates before lay people are allowed to hear about them?
 
Doc Lee weighs in again.
"The president's goal is the same as 'How to inflict the maximum damage possible,'" Lee said in an interview with Salon this week. "His psychopathology makes him avoid all the right decisions, while driving him to make all the wrong decisions, He has been visibly deteriorating, and his sheer desire to deny his failures may get us back to the U.K. group's projections of 2.2 million deaths after all — and then there will be even more failures to deny."

Also, there's this:
People believe mental health professionals only diagnose mental illness, but mental capacity and dangerousness are different evaluations that do not require a personal exam and have everything to do with fitness and public safety.
https://www.salon.com/2020/05/15/ya...inferiority-by-calling-women-reporters-nasty/
 
This author makes a strong case that the expansion of the Goldwater rule was promoted by one APA official largely out of fear that an angry Trump would cut federal funds for psychiatry -- and his own particular institution.
Numerous psychiatrists believe that the APA’s vehement defense of the Goldwater rule is disingenuous and that something else besides a sudden revival of interest in this ethical guideline accounts for its intransigence. In the fall of 2017, John Zinner, a psychiatrist at George Washington University, told The New Yorker that he had heard a “high official” of the APA acknowledge that its leaders were worried that if psychiatrists started criticizing Trump, the president might retaliate by reducing federal dollars for psychiatric treatment. Zinner is also quoted as saying that the Goldwater rule was laid down “really not out of ethical concern, [but…concern for] our pocketbooks.”

Likewise, NYU’s James Gilligan thinks that following the money might provide an explanation for the APA’s actions. “I wonder if the primary worry of academic psychiatrists like Lieberman may be the loss of NIH funding for their biological research,” he says. Trump’s sudden decision earlier this month to suspend the $500 million in funding that the US gives to the World Health Organization lends credibility to Gilligan’s hypothesis. This is clearly a president who uses the power of the federal purse to support his friends and punish his enemies in the scientific community. So perhaps a strict Goldwater rule is one way for the APA to make sure that it stays on amicable terms with Trump.

If this is, in fact, the APA’s strategy, it appears to be working. As the APA noted in a release at the end of 2019, it is pleased with Congressional funding for psychiatric research during the Trump administration, which now includes $2 billion a year to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)—up $155 million from the previous year. And over at Columbia University, where he heads up the New York State Psychiatric Institute (NYSPI) as well as the medical school’s psychiatry department, Lieberman also continues to be the beneficiary of considerable funding by the feds, even though the NYSPSI was slapped with a roughly $10 million fine for overcharging NIH in 2016. According to the latest publicly available figures, in 2018, the NYSPI received about $64 million in NIH grants and, in 2019, the psychiatry department at Columbia another $17 million.
.....
As Richard Painter, who worked as the chief White House ethics lawyer during the presidency of George W. Bush and co-wrote a chapter for the second edition of Lee’s book, stresses, most media outlets readily assume that the American Psychiatric Association formulates its policies based on an assessment of what is likely to be in the best interests of the American people. “But journalists forget that the APA is a guild, and professional guilds—like the APA or the American Bar Association—tend to focus on protecting their members. These guilds often do everything in their power simply to help lawyers or psychiatrists earn a better living,” he says.
https://www.madinamerica.com/2020/04/muzzled-psychiatry-time-crisis/
 
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Oh jesus . . .

A mental capacity evaluation is a very specific thing -the ability to make decisions for oneself.

"Dangerousness" in mental health, specifically refers to "risk of causing harm to self or others." It's the assessment of whether or not such risk of harm should result in involuntary commitment.

None of that is what Dr. Lee is doing here.
 

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