![The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President by [Lee, Bandy X.]](https://i0.wp.com/images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41xXzGms5qL.jpg?w=640&ssl=1)
Since 1973 psychiatrists have followed the “Goldwater Rule” which basically says they shouldn’t diagnose someone without examining them. But current events and tweets have convinced Dr. Brandy Lee and others of a “duty to warn.” The book pictured above warns us of a mentally ill President. The facts are there for all to see – but our values and beliefs will color how we view them. Do you agree they had a “duty to warn?”
I’m reading that book now. It’s not a relaxing read, but I recommend it for measuring your doubts against the experts’ opinions.
And I am hoping that Generals Mattis and Kelly are making sure the codes for the nuclear ‘start war’ button have been changed! I understand Gen Al Hagg had to do something similar when Nixon was drinking heavily and had moved into his paranoid phase.
Could it be that our president is cavalier about antagonizing North Korea to send destruction over the west coast of the United States because, after all, the only land that would be hit would be three blue states…
Joan Conlon
Did they have a duty? ABSOLUTELY. Regrettably it didn’t happen soon enough, i.e. before the election. There was ample evidence in the public domain (and readily accessible to all of us) of his severe and diagnose-able psychological impairments well before November of last year.
Woodrow Wilson is a good example. I once wrote a chapter on the matter:
When Professor Wilson was 39, he suffered a minor stroke that left him with weakness of the right arm and hand, sensory disturbances in the tips of several fingers, and an inability to write in his usual right-handed manner. As often happens following minor strokes, there was recovery: his right-handed writing ability returned within a year.
Was his career impeded? No, in 1902 he became the president of Princeton. But the problem recurred in 1904. In 1906 it happened again, this time with blindness in the left eye (also supplied by the left internal carotid artery, which is probably where clots were originating which plugged up various small arteries in the left eye and left brain). While the right arm weakness went away, Wilson had enough damage to his left eye that he could never read with it again. Some think that his judgment was impaired in the following years–his attempts to reform Princeton academia were often impractical. By 1910 he was essentially being forced out of his presidency by the trustees.
But no matter–in 1910 Wilson was elected the governor of New Jersey. Being a university president is not the usual route to such an office (from being a zoology professor at the University of Washington, Dixie Lee Ray went on to become governor–but her stepping stones were positions as Nixon’s chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and Assistant Secretary of State, not the presidency of the university!). From the governorship, Wilson began his successful campaign for president of the United States. He won the Democratic nomination after a protracted contest, on the forty-sixth ballot.
During the campaign in 1912, Governor Wilson again suffered from mild and temporary neurological problems (now called Transient Ischemic Attacks, or TIAs, they are minor strokes without detectable lasting effects). And, a month after his inauguration, President Wilson had an episode where his left arm and hand were weak. All of the previous right-sided troubles had implicated the left side of the brain. Now it appeared that the right brain was also being damaged by cerebral vascular disease. But he once again recovered, an inspiration to the 2.5 million stroke victims in the U.S. who must cope with their assorted disabilities.
During his first term, President Wilson suffered from serious headaches accompanied by high blood pressure. The headaches became particularly bad at the time of the Lusitania sinking by a German U-boat in l915. Were they just tension headaches, or perhaps neurological symptoms? He was re-elected to a second term in 1916, but suffered a number of TIAs during the next two years as American involvement grew in “the” world war.
Edwin A. Weinstein, the neurology professor who wrote the authoritative Woodrow Wilson: A Medical and Psychological Biography, also notes that President Wilson “grew more suspicious, secretive, and egocentric.” An occupational hazard of the presidency–or a change in personality resulting from brain damage? The U.S. Constitution has since been amended to provide for presidential disability in office, but what neurologist would be brave enough to declare a president disabled from such a history?
If Woodrow Wilson’s brain had suffered no further damage, the history of the following decades could have been very different. For Wilson in 1916 wanted Germany defeated but not crushed; he wanted Germany to be a viable member of the proposed League of Nations. He was convinced that a dictated peace Uwould be accepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice, and that would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which the terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon quicksand.” The overthrow of the Kaiser in 1918 and his replacement by a democratic government raised Wilson’s hopes for rehabilitating Germany. At the 1919 peace conference in Paris, he argued against French efforts to try the ex-Kaiser and to exact punitive reparations.
But then President Wilson suddenly took ill during the conference: he had vomiting, high fever, and the other signs of having caught the influenza which was sweeping Europe and later much of the world. It turned out that the virus had affected his respiratory system, heart, brain, and prostate. Indeed, judging from some of the mental symptoms (his top aide noted that, just overnight, Wilson’s personality changed), Wilson may have suffered another stroke at this time or, as Dr. Weinstein suggests, have also caught the frequently associated virus of encephalitis lethargica (this is the virus whose victims often developed Parkinson’s disease years later, Oliver Sacks wrote about them in Awakenings).
Even before the influenza attack, his obsession with secrecy was pronounced: none of the other American peace commissioners were privy to President Wilson’s thinking. Bedridden, Wilson became obsessed with being overheard, with guarding his papers. In addition to the paranoia, he became euphoric and almost manic at times following the bedridden phase of the illness. He even became socially outgoing in ways quite uncharacteristic of the normally reticent Wilson.
But most striking was Wilson’s change in attitude toward the Germans: now he himself proposed that the former Emperor be tried. Whereas he had previously insisted that the German delegates be granted full diplomatic privileges at the conference, now he was contemptuous of them. Herbert Hoover, who was there, noted the change in Wilson’s behavior: before the influenza, Wilson was willing to listen to advice, was incisive, quick to grasp essentials and unhesitating in his conclusions. Afterward, he had lapses in memory, he groped for ideas, he was obsessed with “precedents.”
More at http://williamcalvin.com/bk2/bk2ch12.htm
Fascinating Bill, thanks. Jim