SHRINKS, HISTORIANS TAG TRUMP AS UNFIT IN SCATHING FILM

Representatives of 70,000 professional psychologists who have tagged President Trump as a malignant narcissist have taken center stage in an 83-minute film entitled “#Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump” and warned US voters that he does not deserve a minute more at the White House.

In a review of the film, which will be shown on September 1, 2020 in the US, Melanie McFarland wrote in Salon and Raw Story on August 29, 2020 (August 30 in Manila) that director Dan Partland assembled a chorus of voices to deliver their expert confirmation of an alarmingly common assessment of Trump, including those closest to Trump, security officials and former White House bureaucrats, and mental health professionals who have taken their concerns public.

Prominently featured is the Duty to Warn PAC’s founder Dr. John Gartner, a psychologist and former professor at the Johns Hopkins University Medical School who explains the meaning of his and his colleagues agreed upon diagnosis of Trump as a malignant narcissist, while defending their ethical choice to do so, junking the oft-cited American Psychiatric Association’s Goldwater Rule, which states that it is unethical for psychiatrists to give a professional opinion about public figures from whom they haven’t obtained consent and whom they haven’t examined in person.

Gartner offers his interpretation of the rule by explaining that when Goldwater was running for president in 1964, and 1,189 psychiatrists declared his unfitness for office in the defunct magazine “Fact,” they were basing their assessments on Freudian methods that have since fallen out of practice. He said the current standard of diagnosis in the mental health field is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), which holds that observable behavior is more vital to a clear diagnosis than the patient interview.

Trump’s entire presidency is one long stretch of observable behavior available to be interpreted in multiple platforms, and that’s before a person digs through his tweets. Thus by standing on the ground of the Tarasoff Rule, which imposes a duty on a therapist to warn appropriate parties when a patient may present a risk of harm to a specific person or persons, Gartner and his colleagues are emboldened to share their assessment. In this case the party in question is the American public, and the diagnosis, malignant narcissism, encompasses paranoia, antisocial personality disorder (otherwise known as psychopathy) and sadism. Not to mention the persistent lying, with 19,127 lies recorded since Trump took office.