Gossip : The Conversation About Trump's Mental Health Is Finally Changing. But Is It Too Late?

unwound day by day.

Coverage of the President usually opens with a cunning line that drags Donald Trump followed by scathing jabs that, at this point, feel like muscle memory. Ill-informed. Erratic. Self-destructive. Abusive. Bigoted. Paranoid. Insecure. Spiteful. They all serve to capture the singularity of the moment.

 

St. Martin's Press

But with the release of a new book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, these thin notions around the president’s instability are fortified for the first time, invigorating the probes surrounding the mental health of the president. Edited by Professor Bandy Lee, a forensic psychiatrist at the Yale School of Medicine, the book introduces 27 psychiatrists and mental health experts who make the case that “anyone as mentally unstable as this man should not be entrusted with the life-and-death-powers of the presidency.” Its impact might amount to conscience-clearing, but a deeper look reveals a new way to discuss just how volatile Trump and the American way of life has become.

You might recall news from earlier this year of Dr. Lee organizing a conference that explored Trump's mental health and how psychiatry experts should respond. The experts recognized that Trump is not the first president to harbor symptoms of mental illness—a 2006 study found that roughly half of our past presidents likely suffered from mental illness—but he's the first to pose a significant threat requiring action. This book is their response, and it holds nothing back.

Assembled are the country’s heavy-hitters in the field of psychology to break down the president’s personality traits, which they find consistent with narcissistic personality disorder, sociopathy, paranoia, hypomania, and other illnesses. Their assessment spans Trump's life with a focus on his campaign and the early months of his tenure (taunting North Korea will have to be added if Lee and company ever update epilogue).

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In the book, Philip Zimbardo, of the Stanford prison study, writes that Trump has a “specific personality type: an unbridled, or extreme, present hedonist” and “narcissist.” John Gartner, a 28-year veteran psychologist at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, outlines how Trump is a “malignant narcissist” and “evinces the most destructive and dangerous collection of psychiatric symptoms possible for a leader.” Retired Harvard psychiatry professor Lance Dodes writes that Trump’s “sociopathic characteristics are undeniable."

Don't give him too much credit. Lee said she has seen thousands of individuals like Trump in her years of work at the intersection of violence prevention and psychology. “But they’re usually not in positions of power,” she said. “They’re usually in jail or prisons,” the settings where she mostly works.