Bob CollinsWe’re probably never going to see the full Mueller report on Russia’s interference in the 2016 election in support of the person who won the election, but a group of psychiatrists have used the redacted version to offer a clinical diagnosis of the president’s mental health.
Dr. Bandy X. Lee, a forensic psychiatrist at Yale School of Medicine, Dr. Leonard L. Glass, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School and Edwin B. Fisher, a clinical psychologist at the Gillings School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, describe their findings in a Thursday essay in the Boston Globe. They are three of five authors of a mental health report based on scenarios described in the the Mueller report.
They’re also the ones who previously had written “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” which first raised concerns about the presidents mental health. In Thursday’s essay, they say details in the Mueller report substantiated “the correctness” of their original assessment.
They focus on the numerous instances in the Mueller report when the president’s closest advisers prevented him from taking dangerous, possibly illegal, actions:
His seditious manner and encouragement of similar subversion of institutions is closely connected to a view of the world as a threatening place where he must fight for himself and buttress his support.
This is a paranoid stance that can quickly turn into violence when a paranoid person is feeling cornered, as corroborated by the president’s later attacks and threats against Cohen when the latter started cooperating with the special counsel. This is a dangerous mindset.
The president is preoccupied with perceived threats to himself, they contend.
“There is no room for consideration of national plans or policies, or his own role in bringing about his predicament and how he might change, but instead a singular focus on how he is a victim of circumstance and his familiar whining about unfairness,” they write, adding:
As mental health professionals, we are able to offer our understanding of behavior when it reflects profound impairment.
The psychological nature of the president’s impairments is thoroughly revealed in the Mueller report. The report has documented the president as willful, enormously self-absorbed, ruthlessly exploitative, threatened, and delusionally heedless of the consequences of his impulsive actions.
His dangerousness constitutes a national crisis.
