At some point, one in five Americans experiences mental illness, ranging from mood disorders to psychoses. Yet fewer than half will obtain mental health services, leading to hundreds of billions of dollars of lost economic output each year, to say nothing of the human cost.
Sure, a shortage of healthcare services may be part of the problem, but stigma against mental illness plays a large role. This helps explain why it is so odious that armchair psychiatrists, from the professional class to the media, would make the stigma worse just to score a petty victory over President Trump.
The “Is Trump actually bipolar/schizophrenic/borderline/[insert mental illness here]?” genre of journalism tends to crop up once every dozen news cycles or so, despite the American Psychiatric Association’s specific direction otherwise. The APA’s Goldwater Rule specifically calls on psychiatrists and medical professionals to refrain from issuing diagnoses of public figures that they’ve never directly evaluated in-person and in a professional setting. Yet doctors continue to ignore ethics and violate the rule to attack Trump. Naturally, partisan journalists are there to abet them.
The latest entry in this disgraceful genre comes from the Huffington Post, which relies on Yale psychiatry professor Bandy X. Lee. If that name sounds familiar, that’s because she’s the hack called in to Congress by Democrats to claim Trump’s about to “unravel.” (If that sounds familiar, it’s because that’s the phrase cable news anchors spent the past two years pairing with “the walls are closing in” and “Mueller’s about to drop a bombshell.”)
The other psychologist cited in the HuffPo piece, John Garter, claims that Trump suffers from “pre-dementia.” This is the same guy who started a Change.org petition to call for Trump’s forcible removal from office. He has spent the better part of a year making the media rounds by claiming Trump has various mental illnesses.
Grifters will grift, and it’s worth wondering why the second-most important Ivy (sorry, folks) didn’t fire Lee the moment she violated APA ethics rules. But more urgently, journalists platforming this medically unethical nonsense need to consider the immediate and potentially fatal ramifications of continually using mental illness accusations as a weapon.
That Trump says outlandish, ridiculous things and lashes out at his enemies on Twitter is just fact. But to insinuate that he does this because he has a mental illness not only stigmatizes those actually suffering, but it paints an entirely unrealistic image of how most people with mental illnesses act in real life.
For one thing, there’s a significant statistical correlation between mental illness and success. CEOs face twice the risk of developing depression as the overall public. Lawyers experience alcoholism at more than three times the rate of the general public. Psychiatrist Michael Freeman found that nearly half of entrepreneurs experience mental illness, as the traits associated with entrepreneurial success directly correlate with bipolar spectrum conditions depression and ADHD.
On top of being inaccurate, armchair speculation about the president’s mental health is just plain dangerous in its role of stigmatizing. The vilification of mental illness has the proven effect of encouraging social distancing, isolating those perceived as mentally ill and then exacerbating lethal loneliness. Then it discourages those who may have an undiagnosed or secret mental illness to suffer in silence and avoid seeking help, culminating in 90% of all suicides.
To recap: The APA specifically asks for mental health professionals not to publicly diagnose strangers. They do so anyways with the approval and assistance of the media. The public becomes more hostile toward those who suffer mental illness, leading those undiagnosed to forgo treatment. Finally, nine in 10 suicides among the mentally ill are directly caused by lack of treatment.
So HuffPo, I hope you enjoy your clicks and whatever thrill it gives you to score a win over Trump while kids kill themselves.
