A provocative and disturbing book was just released three days ago. It in, two dozen health professionals break tradition with the American medical profession by psychoanalyzing a current U.S. president. The book is entitled The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. It is published by Thomas Dunne Books and is 348 pages. The editor of the book is Bandy X. Lee, M.D., M.Div. She is a faculty member in the Law and Psychiatry Division of Yale School of Medicine. She has authored 100+ peer-reviewed articles and edited nine academic books.
The book’s caption at amazon.com says, “The consensus view of two dozen psychiatrists and psychologists that Trump is dangerously mentally ill and that he presents a clear and present danger to the nation and our own mental health.” Journalist and political commentator Bill Moyers says of it, “There will not be a book published this fall more urgent, important, or controversial than The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump … profound, illuminating and discomforting.” The Washington Post says of it, “The stand these psychiatrists are taking takes courage, and their conclusions are compelling.”
One comment about this book at amazon.com includes the following statement about the contributing authors, “These people are all highly trained and are so concerned about the mental health of the President of the United States that they are violating the spirit of the ethics guidance from their professional organizations–namely, not to analyze the mental health of someone you have never examined.
“What motivated the choice to make these insights public was explained at the outset by Drs. Herman and Lee: ‘the public trust is also violated if the profession fails in its duty to alert the public when a person who holds the power of life and death over us all shows signs of clear, dangerous mental impairment.’ Given the power at his command, they feel that the mental health of the president should get at least as much scrutiny as that of other citizens.”
From the time Donald Trump declared his candidacy for U.S. president, in 2015, I have written maybe fifty posts on this blog about my objection to him as president of the United States of America. My primary objection has been his extreme narcissism. That has appeared to me to be a form of mental illness although I have not said so in my posts. I realize that in using this terminology, I open myself up to much criticism–as if I haven’t been getting that due to these posts! But the website of the American Psychiatric Association says, “nearly one in five (19 percent) U.S. adults experience some form of mental illness.” And it adds, “Mental illness is treatable. The vast majority of individuals with mental illness continue to function in their daily lives.”
It looks as though this book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, will confirm some of what I have been saying about Trump as U.S. president.
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