Assessing the President's Mental Health

DONALD TRUMP is unqualified to be president, or much of anything else, by virtue of mental illness, according to John Gartner, who has a PhD in psychology and has created an online petition for the purpose of getting people, mainly other psychologists who agree, to get on board with an attempt to expedite Trump's removal. So far, between forty and fifty thousand have signed on, many but not all of them members of the psychology profession. Psychologists, unlike psychiatrists, are not medical professionals, but merely people who have taken a whole lotta college classes in an attempt to understand human behavior and explain it to the rest of us. Good luck with that, right? The allegation is that Trump is afflicted with two serious mental disorders: malignant narcissism, and anti-social personality disorder. Gartner supports his allegation by pointing to the number of women who have accused trump of sexual molestation, which, according to Gartner, in and of itself constitutes anti-social behavior, since sexual molestation is by definition not an acceptable form of social interaction. The malignant narcissism might be a bit more obvious - orange hair, and all that. Narcissus, we might recall, was an ancient Greek mythological character who looked at his own image in a placid lake, fell in love with it, and was unable to break the trance. There he remains to this day, immersed within, poor fellow. Trump may not be quite that bad, but even his most ardent admirers must admit that he does seem a bit more than merely a bit full of himself. He does have a tendency to dominate every relationship in which he participates, and creates a steady supply of acrimonious interactions with victims. That well documented characteristic might tend more towards the anti-social side than the narcissistic, but, either way, it alarming, no matter who displays it, but particularly the president of the United States, along with his finger on the atom bomb. Trump is certainly not be the first American president to suffer mental illness. Lincoln famously was bi-polar, which he called "melancholia", even as he hid his whittling knife from himself, Kennedy was on anxiety medication, and lord only knows what all else. Nixon curled himself into a fetal position a time or two, and lied like a dog, and Lyndon Johnson pulled the sheet over his head in bed, and complained about "not feeling right." Well, really, who among us is entirely without physical or mental infirmity? Just the same, you wish our chief executive would at the very least quit telling whoppers; if one didn't know better, one might think that the term "pathological liar" belongs on the list.