Stop Saying Donald Trump Is Mentally Ill - by Steven Reisner
NB: The only issue I have with this incisive article is this sentence: Arendt goes on to explain that we in the West are susceptible to such evil precisely because we cannot conceive of it. Can we please exit The West now, Steven? The problems created by the West have now been embraced by humanity as a whole. Despite all our differences our world is united by the evil of permanent war, cruelty, and indifference to our fellow beings and the environment that sustains us. Instead of growing the good in us, we have a political and economic system that feeds upon and reproduces the most base and bestial aspects of human character. Money and falsehood travel at the speed of light, but suffering humanity is stranded in 'statelessness'. Even when they 'have' a state, they're still stranded.
We live in a nihilist time, when speech and silence are rendered equivalent; and truth has been flattened by propaganda from every - repeat every - side of the political and religious spectrum. Governments and state machines, whether run by corporates or communist parties, use the media to destroy our minds. We are no longer permitted the dignity of thought. Instead of using language to communicate our problems and find ways to overcome them, we use it instead to retreat inwards: into our religion, our nation, our selves. Blind, unthinking retreat leads only to the abyss. Suicide bombers, barking patriots, dreamers of martyrdom, moral policemen and those who lust for power at any cost - all belong to the army of nihilist terminators.
Nihilism and annihilation arise from the
same root - nihil, nothingness. Evil is the impulse to annihilation: the
annihilation of language, truth, time and life. And we help sustain it. At the
height of the violence of 1947 Mahatma Gandhi had said, “it is time for
peace-loving citizens to assert themselves and isolate goondaism. Non-violent
non-cooperation is the universal remedy. Good is self-existent, evil is not. It
is like a parasite living in and around good. It will die of itself when the
support that good gives it is withdrawn." It is time for humanity to cease
cooperating with destructiveness; and to recover its capacity for moral
discretion. DS
**********************
He is a “reality”
artist, building an evil new society. We must realize this to stop him.
We must understand that Trump thrives in the aftermath of his provocations. Like a looter who instigates a riot, Trump is a master at navigating the chaos he himself provokes.
By the sheer force of his personality, power, bullying tendencies, and money, Trump can bend reality to his perspective, which he does using a simple technique: He simply shifts the evidence for what is real from facts to feelings.
Radical evil is the manipulation of others’ perception of reality in order to increasingly concentrate power and wealth in the hands of the few. It is a strategy to sow chaos in order to take advantage of the fear that chaos brings. It is the twisting of facts to frighten citizens into believing that their safety requires them to turn against others. And it is the collapsing of what is good and moral into what is rich and powerful
Donald Trump’s mental
health has been a favorite topic since well before he officially took office.
In the weeks since the inauguration, though, the debate over whether we should
invoke the 25th Amendment to declare him mentally ill and
incapable of performing the job has reached an almost fevered pitch. Trump
himself seems to reinvigorate this debate on a regular basis, for example in
his recent tweet that the “sick”
Obama White House had his phones tapped.
Many of the nation’s
psychiatrists and psychologists, along with thousands of other health
professionals have weighed in on the side of mental illness, in the Huffington Post,
in the New York Times,
in Slate. More than 30,000 mental health
professionals have signed on to an online petition,
directed to Sen. Charles Schumer, arguing that Trump “manifests a serious
mental illness that renders him psychologically incapable of competently
discharging the duties of President of the United States” and “he must be
removed from office.” Case closed?
Not so fast. None of
these health professionals have indicated how they define mental
illness.
Instead, they follow the unfortunate tendency of modern psychiatry, exacerbated by the profit motive of the medical industry, to confuse symptoms with illnesses and to offer criteria for diagnosis so broad that they would apply to most people. And, in fact, they do. According to statistics from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, using current DSM-V criteria, an astonishing 25 percent of Americans can be considered to have a mental illness in any given year, and 50 percent can be diagnosed with a mental illness sometime in their lives.
Instead, they follow the unfortunate tendency of modern psychiatry, exacerbated by the profit motive of the medical industry, to confuse symptoms with illnesses and to offer criteria for diagnosis so broad that they would apply to most people. And, in fact, they do. According to statistics from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, using current DSM-V criteria, an astonishing 25 percent of Americans can be considered to have a mental illness in any given year, and 50 percent can be diagnosed with a mental illness sometime in their lives.
This goes for
presidents as well. A recent study in
the Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases found that nearly
50 percent of presidents in American history met the criteria for a psychiatric
disorder, and 27 percent exhibited the disorder while in office.
Does that mean we
haven’t invoked the 25th Amendment often enough? No, in fact, I
would argue that without a working definition of mental illness,
these statistics are meaningless. Before tackling the question of whether
Donald Trump is of sound mind, we must first ask: What is a mental Illness?
In general, mental
health professionals tend to draw from two radically different perspectives to
determine what is and what is not mental illness, with each view invoking a
rather different set of criteria and values. Some use normativity as their
standard of measure, viewing deviations from the norm as a sign of mental
illness. According to the World Health
Organization, someone suffering from narcissistic personality
disorder (which is most frequently given as
Trump’s mental illness) must demonstrate “extreme or significant deviations
from the way in which the average individual in a given culture perceives,
thinks, feels and, particularly, relates to others.” Thus, these clinicians
assert, Trump is mentally ill because he is delusional about reality,
grandiose, impulsive, and believes himself to be the most powerful man in the
world.
Alternatively,
diagnoses can be based on experiences of distress, combined with social and
occupational impairment. This diagnosis requires the individual to be suffering
from the subjective experience of distress alongside objective
criteria of compromised functioning in relationships or employment.
It is easy to dispense
with the second option, since Trump is evidently not suffering and he cannot be
said to be impaired. We may not like his leadership style, but his personality
seems mainly to have been an asset for him in the worlds of real estate and
politics. And he seems constitutionally incapable of self-doubt or other kinds
of personal distress, and perhaps even derives pleasure from his aggression and
impulsivity. As Allen Francis, the psychiatrist who wrote the criteria for
narcissistic personality disorder in the American Psychiatric
Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders, the DSM, put it, “He
may be a world-class narcissist, but this doesn’t make him mentally ill,
because he does not suffer from the distress and impairment required to
diagnose a mental disorder.”
If there’s no
distress, what about the other criteria? Is his insanity simply self-evident
because he deviates from what any child would recognize as normal? Paul Krugman
seems to think so, tweeting shortly
after the inauguration: “An American First: a president who was obviously
mentally ill the moment he took office.” But this may not be so clear-cut,
either. Do we really want to use deviation from the norm as criteria for
diagnosing mental illness? After all, one person’s impulsivity is another
person’s courage. Would we consider Albert Einstein or Steve Jobs mentally ill,
simply because they deviate from the norm? In America, at least, we admire
people who “think different” and “just do it.”
* * *
But the real problem
with diagnosing Trump as mentally ill based on deviation from the norm is that
Trump himself is a master at determining what counts as normal. Especially in
our brave new world of reality television, Trump has an outsize influence—he is
such a virtuoso of media-made reality that media coverage itself often helps
turn his wildest statements into fact sooner than fact checkers can convince
Americans otherwise. Let’s not forget that immigrants may not have been rioting
in Sweden when Trump made his mysterious claim, but
they actually did begin rioting soon
afterward. And Trumps’ far-fetched statements about a deep state and
rampant immigrant terrorism may
actually help bring these about, strengthening Trump’s hand. And now, even his
outlandish claim of being wiretapped is being given some credence.
Sigmund Freud had a
word for those whose unique gifts permit them to bend reality to their will: artists. According to Freud,
the artist “allows his erotic and ambitious wishes full play in the life of
fantasy. He finds the way back to reality, however, from this world of fantasy
by making use of special gifts to mold his fantasies into truths of a new
kind.” Trump has to be understood, then, as a reality artist, one
who is adept at the strategies that turn his biggest whoppers into reality. It
is reminiscent of Charles Foster Kane, in Orson Welles’ classic film, who, when informed
by the war reporter he dispatched to Cuba that there was no war to be found but
only delightful girls and beautiful scenery worthy of prose poems, famously
replied, “Dear Wheeler, you provide the prose poems, I’ll provide the war.”
By the sheer force of his
personality, power, bullying tendencies, and money, Trump can bend reality to
his perspective, which he does using a simple technique: He simply shifts the
evidence for what is real from facts to feelings.
Thus he employs to
great effect his strategy of appearing insane, impulsive, vengeful, and
unpredictable - frightening his opponents with “American carnage”
at one moment and taking advantage of their relief, the next, when he suddenly
appears compassionate, reasonable, and “presidential.”
He intensifies his supporters’ feelings, too, when it serves his reality - elevating their pain and suffering into
evidence of his own sanity in a world gone mad and mobilizing their aggression
at those who can be blamed for their misery. Bobbing and weaving between
cruelty and compassion, impulsivity and sobriety, he makes his own definitions
of what is real, changing them when they cease to be useful and turning the tables on
his critics when challenged significantly.
We must understand
that Trump thrives in the aftermath of his provocations. Like a looter who
instigates a riot, Trump is a master at navigating the chaos he himself
provokes. To call Trump’s exaggeration of immigrant criminality delusional is
to miss Trump’s real aim of bolstering the emotional evidence for
his narrative: that outsiders have stolen Americans’ birthright and only a
strong leader can make this right. To make his claim an emotional reality, he
plans to create a new police force to crack down on immigrant crime and widely publicize the
evidence.
We have seen how
successful the shift from facts to feelings is as political strategy. Let’s not
forget that we live in a country where a majority believe the
government is hiding the truth about the 9/11 attacks, and more than a quarter
believe the same about Obama’s birth certificate.
But it is time we
understood that when therapists call Trump crazy, hoping for some higher
authority to invoke the 25th Amendment and save the country, what
they are really saying is that Trump lives in a reality that they don’t like
and don’t understand. And in doing so, they are playing right into Trump’s
preferred reality-no longer holding him to account on the basis of law,
politics, and personal responsibility, but rather transferring him, like Brer
Rabbit, into the briar patch of feelings, charisma, and threat. And in that
particular briar patch, Trump is the professional and the psychiatrists are
amateurs. So, like the gangster or outlaw who runs out of bullets when faced
with a stronger foe, they stoop to the last resort and throw their gun: He’s
crazy!
When in reality what they are saying is: He is off-the-charts
scary, and I don’t know how to stop him.
* * *
In Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt
writes:
It is inherent in our
entire philosophical tradition that we cannot conceive of a “radical evil.” …
Therefore we actually have nothing to fall back on in order to understand a
phenomenon that nevertheless confronts us with its overpowering reality and breaks
down all standards we know.
It is time for us to
give up the fantasy that, when applied to political figures, the term mental
illness means anything more than that the people in power hold values
and beliefs so radically different from what we thought was reasonable that we
are justifiably afraid of what they will do with that power. We may want to
believe that we live in a society where self-aggrandizement, aggression,
valuing wealth above all else, doing whatever is necessary to guarantee the
power and influence of oneself and one’s family, and forcing into submission
all those who stand in the way were not traits that lead to success and
admiration, but we don’t. We may wish that America were a country where people
used the “greatest good for the greatest number” as their ethical model and
politicians used science and data to determine the fate of the world, but we
don't.
If we are to combat
Trump, we must understand how he has elevated and manipulated certain American
values, like greed and exceptionalism, to
undermine so many others, like truth, justice, and the American Constitution. This is not madness.
And the impulsivity, threats, aggression, ridicule, denial of reality, and
mobilization of the mob that he used to get there are not symptoms.
It is time
to call it out for what it is: evil.
Arendt goes on to explain that we in the West
are susceptible to such evil precisely because we cannot conceive of it. We
prefer to believe that people are innately good, and evil is some kind of “fall
from grace,” an anomaly, a madness perhaps, but one always “explained by
comprehensible motives.” We are at a loss to confront Trumpism, because his
strategy is evil for its own ends, and thus reflects, as Arendt
described, “a system of values so radically different from all others, that
none of our traditional legal, moral, or common sense utilitarian categories
could any longer help us to come to terms with, or judge, or predict their course
of action.”
If Arendt is right and
we are susceptible to radical evil because we cannot conceive of it, then the
work of opposition must begin with learning to call it what it is. So here is a
definition for our time: Radical evil is the manipulation of
others’ perception of reality in order to increasingly concentrate power and
wealth in the hands of the few. It is a strategy to sow chaos in order to take
advantage of the fear that chaos brings. It is the twisting of facts to
frighten citizens into believing that their safety requires them to turn
against others. And it is the collapsing of what is good and moral into what is
rich and powerful, and ruthlessly using that wealth and that power to accrue
more wealth and power.
That is why our
efforts have to be aimed not at diagnosing Trump, but at stopping Trumpism. To
call it madness is to try and bring it into the realm of the familiar and to
miss the real threat that Trump embodies: He thrives in turmoil, he has an
uncanny ability to bend the world to his reality, he is charismatic and
ruthless, hypnotic and terrifying, and we, in this country, have rarely seen
his like before. To fight Trumpism, we must actively expose and combat the
overpowering reality he is trying to create - and we must abandon the comforting
delusion that Trump is delusional.
Steven Reisner is a
psychoanalyst and founding member of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology
and adviser on ethics and psychology for Physicians for Human Rights. Follow him on Twitter.
see also
The war against
radical evil requires us to take Nietzsche's project seriously: « Ask a big question rather than deliver a grand
statement: » This means: instead of focusing on God, look to
ideals, and their absence in order to make them known and reassessed
