The November edition of the British Journal of Psychiatry published an exchange of views between an American psychologist, John Gartner, and a British psychiatrist, Alex Langford, on the question of whether it is ethical for a psychiatrist to diagnose a public figure whom he has not personally examined.
Gartner argues that it is not only permissible for psychiatrists to diagnose President Trump, but also obligatory for them to do so, and that furthermore they should agitate for his removal from office on psychiatric or psychological grounds.
Truth itself is under attack here ... Dr Bandy Lee ... has seriously proposed that Trump meets standards for commitment and should be required to undergo psychiatric evaluation, whether he wants to or not.
Among the things that strikes me about Gartner's contribution to one of the best-known psychiatric journals in the world is that he displays absolutely no knowledge or imaginative insight into what it is actually like to live in a totalitarian dictatorship-his Jewishness notwithstanding-despite countless memoirs, academic books, and films attesting to and describing life under authoritarian rule.
In the Soviet Union, psychiatrists occupied the kind of commissarship that Gartner is appealing for now.
Gartner shows an implicit contempt for American institutions and history if he thinks that the election of one allegedly unstable man can turn his country into a fascist dictatorship almost overnight.
Langford, increasingly alarmed by the implications of what Gartner says, returns an answer: "Has Professor Gartner put even the slightest thought into why 63 million voted for a man that dozens have described as sexist, racist, abusive, denigrating, incompetent, lazy and untruthful ...? Perhaps ... those voters were sick of 'elitist' experts making all the decisions about their country, and his was the only way they had to show their anger?".
https://www.city-journal.org/psychiatrically-diagnosing-public-figures
Gartner argues that it is not only permissible for psychiatrists to diagnose President Trump, but also obligatory for them to do so, and that furthermore they should agitate for his removal from office on psychiatric or psychological grounds.
Truth itself is under attack here ... Dr Bandy Lee ... has seriously proposed that Trump meets standards for commitment and should be required to undergo psychiatric evaluation, whether he wants to or not.
Among the things that strikes me about Gartner's contribution to one of the best-known psychiatric journals in the world is that he displays absolutely no knowledge or imaginative insight into what it is actually like to live in a totalitarian dictatorship-his Jewishness notwithstanding-despite countless memoirs, academic books, and films attesting to and describing life under authoritarian rule.
In the Soviet Union, psychiatrists occupied the kind of commissarship that Gartner is appealing for now.
Gartner shows an implicit contempt for American institutions and history if he thinks that the election of one allegedly unstable man can turn his country into a fascist dictatorship almost overnight.
Langford, increasingly alarmed by the implications of what Gartner says, returns an answer: "Has Professor Gartner put even the slightest thought into why 63 million voted for a man that dozens have described as sexist, racist, abusive, denigrating, incompetent, lazy and untruthful ...? Perhaps ... those voters were sick of 'elitist' experts making all the decisions about their country, and his was the only way they had to show their anger?".
https://www.city-journal.org/psychiatrically-diagnosing-public-figures
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