- Obviously someone diverging from liberal political correctness is pathological
- How is this Duke professor’s “diagnosis” different from the purpose behind punitive psychiatry of the Soviet Union?
- Praise
Jesus(sorry, insert favorite politically correct however delusional fairy-tale) Biden gets clean bill of mental health!
Two Stories, Two Different ‘Takes” on The Same Nutty Psychiatrist “Diagnosing Trump” For CNN
In our view the American Psychiatric Association somehow needs to keep people publicly associated with its “profession”(?) out of the media.
They tend to confirm what many of us believe. The people involved today in psychology, psychiatry, counseling, etc, with a few exceptions, need help far more than their unwary “patients” or “clients”.
We think it’s useful to present “side by side” reports from two different news organizations reporting on the same story.
In neither story, however, does the subject come out looking good. In fact both seem to amount to a call for the men in white coats to come and get this character. (Hats off to Duke Univ. for its sense of humor in showing the world the quality of mental health analysis, mixing with politics these days.) DLH Other of our comments follow.
Daily Caller:
Former Duke Chair of Psychiatry Dr. Allen Frances admitted Sunday that President Donald Trump was not mentally ill, but suggested that if using that argument would get Trump removed from office, he would do it.
Frances appeared on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” with Brian Stelter to discuss what he felt were the dangers of declaring Trump mentally unfit — namely, he said, calling Trump “crazy” was an insult to people who do have mental illnesses.
— acceptable to lie about Trump’s mental state if there was a way to use that false narrative to get him out of office —
“I think it’s very clear that he’s dangerous because he’s evil, he’s not dangerous because he’s mentally ill, and the mentally ill argument, if it would get him out of the office, I would say go with it even if it’s inaccurate,” Frances continued. “Anything to get this man out of office. But it won’t work, so piling on inaccuracy, stigma, the press will get people who know nothing about psychiatric diagnosis spouting off at the mouth, it won’t add to the discussion, it will distract from the political stuff and we have to focus on how evil —”
Stelter interrupted but did not push back on Frances’ willingness to lie to push Trump out of office. Instead, he said that he felt there was a need to “connect the dots,” adding, “There is something wrong here when he’s attacking his Federal Reserve chair, misspelling the guy’s name and doing 50 of those things a day. I’m kind of grasping for the language to use around this, but it’s —”
“I have — I think I have better language,” Frances cut in. “I think Trump is best characterized as a spoiled brat, as a baby having temper tantrums, as a completely unfit person unable to meet the challenges and the responsibilities of his office, as a con man, as a — the most narcissistic person maybe in our time and a narcissist for all times. All of these — as a thief. As a corrupter of others, as an obstructor of justice. These are terms that all make sense. Attributing every bad behavior that humanity is capable of to mental illness misses the point of evil and also stigmatizes the mentally ill.”
Newsweek:
PSYCHIATRIST WARNS CNN AGAINST DIAGNOSING TRUMP’S MENTAL HEALTH
A controversial CNN segment Sunday morning featured the former head of Duke University’s Psychiatry Department demanding professionals stop discussing President Donald Trump’s mental health in terms of “psychological name-calling.”
Dr. Allen Frances, author of Twilight of American Sanity, appeared on Brian Stelter’s CNN program Sunday to push back against a Yale School of Medicine psychiatry professor and several other mental health professionals who often appear on cable news networks to “diagnose” Trump from afar based on his frequently erratic behavior and public comments. Stelter was later ridiculed on social media for allowing Dr. Frances to claim “Trump is as destructive a person in this century as Hitler, Stalin and Mao were in the last century.”
On Sunday afternoon, Stelter blamed “tech difficulties” that kept him from hearing Dr. Frances’ comparisons to the murderous 20th Century dictators and apologized for not interrupting the controversial commentary. Several psychiatrists appeared on MSNBC and other networks Sunday accusing Trump of being a narcissist and a “successful sociopath” along with other negative mental health diagnoses.
“I think medicalizing politics has three very dire consequences,” Dr. Frances told Stelter Sunday morning, warning colleagues against diagnosing Trump from afar.
“The first is it stigmatizes the mentally ill. I’ve known thousands of patients, almost all of them have been well-behaved, well-mannered, good people—Trump is none of these.”
“Lumping in the mentally ill with Trump is a terrible insult to the mentally ill and they have enough problems and stigma as it is,” he added. Stelter noted to a previous psychiatrist guest that she’d “never met” Trump in person.
“The second issue is calling Trump ‘crazy’ hides the fact that we’re crazy for having elected him and even crazier for allowing his crazy policies to persist,” Dr. Frances continued. “Trump is as destructive a person in this century as Hitler, Stalin and Mao were in the last century. He may be more responsible for millions of more deaths than they were. He needs to be contained. But he needs to be contained by attacking his policies and not his person.”
Several right-wing Twitter accounts and other pundits pounced on Dr. Frances’ claim, noting Mao, Hitler and Stalin were each responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people, prompting the apology from Stelter Sunday afternoon.
Dr. Frances went on to say it’s only “crazy” not to tax the rich or to have Republicans block climate change legislation. (It appears to us that Dr. Frances is charging that all Trump voters are suffering from a “mental illness” for “not taxing the rich”! And that assertion is not a “terrible insult” to the mentally ill?)
“Discussing the issue in psychological name-calling terms distracts us from getting out the vote,” he added in the segment entitled, “Tiptoeing Around Trump’s Instability.”
Earlier Sunday on MSNBC’s AM Joy program, retired Harvard clinical psychiatrist Dr. Lance Dodes diagnosed Donald Trump as having a “fundamental psychological problem” that causes him to seek male approval from Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“Donald Trump does have a fundamental psychological problem,” he said. “He needs to be loved all the time, he needs to have power over everyone all the time. Once you get that idea down, the rest of his behavior and his speech makes sense…He’s an extremely successful sociopath.”
Dr. Frances concluded the segment by saying Trump will “never be removed from office on the grounds of mental unfitness…that will never happen.”
Related reading here:
The Biden good news:
Has any President not been characterized by their political opponents as evil or a narcissist?
If Trump did not respond to the calumny and mania and real malice aimed at him, such extreme (in context) apathy in the face of such real harm to himself but also his family and supporters, would that not just as glibly be characterized as schizophrenia?
How would you respond to torments and evil coming from your opponents?
Oh, we see, evil is in the eye of the beholder
What is more narcissistic than seeing evil in others but not yourself, a characteristic of Trumps accusers?
What percentage of sociopaths are Democrats?
Don’t take it personally but you are a nutcase. R Mall
