Mental health professionals are not supposed to offer diagnoses of people they have not treated in a professional capacity. That includes call-in shows. It most definitely includes someone they've only seen on television. But we had the same circus during the Bush administration. And accusing Trump of being mentally ill feeds the left's 25th Amendment fantasies.
So here comes MSNBC...
Some psychologists and psychiatrists are speaking out about Trump because of a duty to warn. Lawrence talks to two experts with this view: Dr. Lance Dodes and Dr. John Gartner, whose online petition of mental health professionals has more than 26,000 signatures.
They have a duty to offer unprofessional opinions of a man whom they haven't met, but whose politics they dislike?
John Gartner has been offering his diagnoses of Trump for a while now.
John D. Gartner, a practicing psychotherapist who taught psychiatric residents at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, minces as few words as the president in his professional assessment of Trump.
"Donald Trump is dangerously mentally ill and temperamentally incapable of being president," says Gartner, author of "In Search of Bill Clinton: A Psychological Biography." Trump, Gartner says, has "malignant narcissism," which is different from narcissistic personality disorder and which is incurable.
Gartner acknowledges that he has not personally examined Trump, but says it's obvious from Trump's behavior that he meets the diagnostic criteria for the disorder, which include anti-social behavior, sadism, aggressiveness, paranoia and grandiosity.
Yes. Also it's obvious from Gartner's behavior that he is manic depressive and is fixated on his father. This fixation leads him to lash out at Trump.
See anyone can offer worthless diagnoses of a man whom they haven't met.
"We've seen enough public behavior by Donald Trump now that we can make this diagnosis indisputably," says Gartner. His comments run afoul of the so-called Goldwater Rule, the informal term for part of the ethics code of the American Psychiatric Association saying it is wrong to provide a professional opinion of a public figure without examining that person and gaining consent to discuss the evaluation. But Gartner says the Trump case warrants breaking that ethical code.
So unethical, unprofessional and suffering from projection. It's against my ethical code as a journalist to offer psychological diagnoses of left-wing cranks with degrees, but the Gartner case warrants breaking that ethical code.