Calling Trump Mentally ill is an Insult to Mentally ill

Let’s try and put this in perspective for one moment. We are talking about the supposed leader of the free world. Yes—I think this is worthy of serious introspection.

What higher authority can we have other than the Doctor who defined narcissistic personality disorder—Dr. Allen Frances, a professor emeritus of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University Medical College. This is what Dr Allen Frances has written:

Fevered media speculation about Donald Trump’s psychological motivations and psychiatric diagnosis has recently encouraged mental health professionals to disregard the usual ethical constraints against diagnosing public figures at a distance. Most amateur diagnosticians have mislabeled President Trump with the diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder. I wrote the criteria that define this disorder, and Mr. Trump doesn’t meet them. 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 mental disorder.

It is a stigmatizing insult to the mentally ill (who are mostly well behaved and well meaning) to be lumped with Mr. Trump (who is neither). Bad behavior is rarely a sign of mental illness, and the mentally ill behave badly only rarely. Psychiatric name-calling is a misguided way of countering Mr. Trump’s attack on democracy. He can, and should, be appropriately denounced for his ignorance, incompetence, impulsivity and pursuit of dictatorial powers.

So there we have it, calling Trump mentally ill is an insult to mentally ill. This is just like calling Trumpeteers stupid is an insult to stupid people. Jamie Lee Curtis talks to the worlds first Trumpeteer.

Yes Trumpeteers are far worse that Stupid, and simply calling them stupid is actually letting them off the hook. The Math will prove with absolute clarity just how bad these people really are. You would think that all this is pretty easy to understand—but sadly there is a pitfall to rational thinking and it only seems appropriate to let John Cleese explain the actual Science behind the irony.