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The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.Itis Sociohistorical, Political, and Scientific Contexts in Ambiguous but Not Innocent

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The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.Itis Sociohistorical, Political, and Scientific Contexts in Ambiguous but Not Innocent BOOKS AND MEDIA raged, his approval rating climbed to almost 40 per- cent on domestic polls, higher than it had been in months. The Dangerous Case of Donald To many psychiatrists, President Trump’s state- Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and ments and behaviors were patently symptomatic of one or several mental disorders. The facts of the case Mental Health Experts Assess and the serious risks of erosion of our constitutional a President democracy and possible nuclear annihilation of the world demanded that psychiatrists warn the public. Edited by Bandy X. Lee, MD, MDiv. New York: Thomas The analogy to the silence of Germany’s educated Dunne Books, St. Martin’s Press, 2017. 384 pp. $27.99 and professional classes during Hitler’s ascendancy hardcover. to power was too obvious to ignore; but roughly 40 percent of the country does not agree that the presi- Just between the time that an email request from the dent is evil or dangerous. book review editor of the Journal arrived (November Bandy Lee’s edited book, a compilation stemming 28, 2017) to the time of sitting down to begin writ- from the presentations at a similarly themed confer- ing a first draft of this review (January 14, 2018), ence that took place in New Haven, CT, in April there was a flood of print and electronic media opin- 2017, is a sincere act of conscience. The authors of ions on the interrelated topics of President Donald the 28 chapters (including Prologue, Introduction, Trump’s mental health and perceived dangerous- and Epilogue) are not in full agreement as to the ness. Further, elucidated during this discussion has details of what they believe ails President Trump, but been the controversy about the American Psychiatric all concur that he is mentally ill or dangerous (by Association’s (APA’s) position on the Goldwater virtue of being president) or both. There is discor- Rule, which declares unethical and forbids all public dance as to the nature or the diagnosis of the mental opinions by psychiatrists about diagnoses and mental illness that makes him dangerous, and the various health status of public figures whom the opining authors take their shots as to which descriptive terms party has not directly examined according to ac- and which diagnoses fit best. Along the way, the au- 1 cepted standards for psychiatric evaluation. thors acknowledge the heavy presence of the Gold- Keeping up with the media and print publications water Rule and the intimidation to silence psychia- about President Trump seriously hampered writing trists that the APA leadership and Ethics Committee this review, as events of each day threatened to over- have imposed.3,4 I think that the critically important run whatever I had written. This experience re- question taken up in this volume is Mr. Trump’s minded me of occurrences during the presidential fitness to serve as president and that the furor over the campaign. Mr. Trump the candidate presented him- Goldwater Rule will become a footnote in the history self as embodying several traits that many thought of of this presidency and this era. as incompatible with the task of serving as the presi- It is clear that the president’s dangerousness is the dent of our country. All of this was brought out pub- most important concern to our country, especially to licly and repeatedly during the long campaign. With those poor and disenfranchised persons who will be each howler, liberals and moderates were convinced most damaged by his policies5 and to the global en- that surely this latest gaff would be the candidate’s vironment that may be irrevocably affected. I was undoing; U.S. citizens would never stand for it. With also interested to see how deeply the authors would each such attack, his supporters grew more certain take on and debate the Goldwater Rule. One could that he was their man; even women supporters de- assume that the authors’ willingness to make public fended this man who demeaned and made nasty sex- diagnostic, descriptive, or psychological statements ual comments about women. His base did not reject about a public figure of whom they have not person- him as the liberals expected or hoped. In late January ally conducted a formal diagnostic assessment serves 2018, President Trump made some of his most of- to challenge the APA’s long-held principle. This not- fensive statements when referring to Haiti and other withstanding, I was also hoping to read a thoughtful African nations in derogatory terms.2 While nations debate in which the Goldwater Rule was placed in around the world and many of us at home were out- broader social and intellectual context. I hoped to see Volume 46, Number 2, 2018 267 a dissection of the arguments given by the APA con- less a case of frontal lobe disinhibition than lifelong sidering the common experience that the community asocial habits. standard for doing psychiatric assessments in the Moreover, I hoped to find an in-depth discussion trenches of a community health center, a homeless of the controversies attached to attempts by a gov- shelter or an emergency room differs substantially erning board or administrative managers to regulate from the ideal of an extended personal interview: important moral positions that are core to one’s per- particularly as this idealized version is often complete sonal identity and being in the world. Ethics-related with medical records and a rational subject who can matters should not be decided by a vote of our peers, provide a linear life history. Further, I hoped there let alone by committee members who, by virtue of would be discussion of why a personal psychiatric their medical degrees or their election to important interview is considered more trustworthy than, say, posts in a professional organization, have no special watching hours of videotapes of a subject engaged in claims or expertise in moral theory. It seemed to me a range of activities. that the present Goldwater Rule controversy came At this point, in the interest of transparency and about because the APA leadership misunderstood declaration of possible conflict of interest, I have to that an admonitory statement reflecting disapproval say that I have serious misgivings about Donald of offering diagnoses of a public figure in the absence Trump’s fitness to serve as President of the United of a personal interview is a technical rule, not an States and also that I have been strongly opposed to ethics-based one. It relates to the empirical question the Goldwater Rule since well before his candidacy of the best method for making a valid diagnosis. Al- and election. Claire Pouncey and I co-chaired a sym- asdair MacIntyre, in discussing the role in modern posium at the 2008 APA meeting debating the Gold- society of the “manager, the bureaucratic expert,” water Rule6 and subsequently published a related ar- whose status is based upon a claim of effectiveness in ticle in the Journal in June 2016 that did not have controlling certain aspects of social reality, states that this claimed effectiveness is not a morally neutral Mr. Trump in mind, but benefitted from the rele- value. The manager’s claim of effectiveness is “insep- vance that his campaign behavior lent to our article.7 arable from a mode of human existence in which the In reading the book, I hoped to find a process of contrivance of means is in central part the manipu- reflection about the history and context of diagnostic lation of human beings into compliant patterns of practices in psychiatry, including the tentative nature behavior” (Ref. 8, p 74). of psychiatric diagnoses which are often considered a The first thing one notices about the text itself is work in progress. Further, it is critical to consider the the title The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.Itis sociohistorical, political, and scientific contexts in ambiguous but not innocent. When a doctor speaks which diagnostic systems are developed, discarded, of a case, the term references a clinical case in which or altered based on considerations less scientific than a person becomes a patient, with a history, symp- political, or opportunistic, or prejudicial, or ac- toms, laboratory findings, medical conditions, and a cepted, pending the next rewriting of the Diagnostic life lived in a community, but here in the title of the and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). book sits one of the key disputed points: the psychi- The list of formal and informal diagnoses that have atrist has to deny that Mr. Trump’s case is one of a fallen by the wayside (homosexuality, pseudoneu- patient while simultaneously providing a diagnosis rotic schizophrenia, sluggish schizophrenia, inade- that is claimed not to be a diagnosis; otherwise, all the quate personality, hysterical neurosis, and neurasthe- Hippocratic and legal, medical, and ethics-related nia) or of those that have made belated appearances problems arise: confidentiality, privacy, respect, be- (posttraumatic stress disorder, tobacco use disorder, neficence, nonmaleficence, and some sort of mutual and narcissistic personality disorder) is sufficient to contract. So, if he is not a patient, which he is not, in lend some humility to the diagnostic process or to what sense is he a “case,” and why is the term used in diagnostic pronouncements in psychiatry. I also the title of the book? It is left unclear, purposely, I hoped to find discussion of various neurological assume. If there was any doubt that convening a con- and medicinal possibilities suggested by President ference that assesses the mental health of a president Trump’s apparently declining cognitive skills and and publishing a book of the papers given at the lack of impulse control, although the latter may be conference sticks a finger in the eye of the APA lead- 268 The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law Books and Media ership, then the labeling of President Trump as a case wording of Tarasoff and is a legalistic argument that throws down the gauntlet.
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