How Dangerous To The Rest Of Us Is Trump's Mental Illness?

An old friend of mine worked for a firm that bought the medical practice of one of Trump's doctors. I'm sure it was unethical and possibly illegal, but my friend examined Trump's medical records, which is how, back before he won the Republican nomination, I was able to report that his sniffling and his bizarre mental swings were due to a long habit of crushing up adderall and snorting it, something the medical personnel taught him to do. Today, that friend, suggested I write a post called "Trump and Amphetamine Psychosis." He added that Trump "is also on Cialis, which is why he is red and puffy; it does that. Trump gets his energy from Adderall; he never sleeps and is up early. Hitler was pumped full of large doses of amphetamines as you may recall. Adderall is an amphetamine, and there is a condition called Amphetamine Psychosis." Do these symptoms of Adderall abuse sound like they belong to anyone we all know and loathe? "Snorting Adderall is common among users looking for immediate effects. They crush up their pills into a fine powder, sniffing Adderall into their sinus cavity. This often leads to a more intense high, but snorting Adderall comes with its own side effects. Snorting pills cause destruction of the nasal and sinus cavities. The longer someone continues taking Adderall in this way, the more damage that can be done. Snorting also amplifies other Adderall side effects such as irregular heartbeat. Those snorting Adderall also have a heightened risk of overdose.

• Being overly talkative
• Unusual excitability
• Social withdrawal
• Financial troubles
• Aggression
• Secretive behavior
• Memory loss
• Incomplete thoughts
• Relationship problems
• Decline in personal hygiene
• Frequently taking pills
• Disorientation
• Mania
• Impulsive behaviors

Chauncey DeVega, writing over the weekend for Salon, reported on Trump's mental illness. HIs version in his podcast (below) is far better; be sure to listen. But the basics are that Dr. Bandy Lee. a Yale professor of psychiatry and editor of the bestselling book The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, convened a panel comprised of leading mental health experts to evaluate Trump based on his behavior as detailed in the Mueller report. "Their definitive conclusion: Trump is mentally unfit, a threat to the United States and the world, and as such should have his powers severely restricted. At the invitation of several Democratic members of Congress, Lee and other mental health professionals will present their findings about Donald Trump's mental health at what they hope will be a bipartisan congressional meeting in Washington next month." Here are a few excerpts from the latest interview DeVega did with Dr. Lee. Again, the podcast is better.

DeVega: Trump appears to be pure unrestrained id. He is driven by greed. Trump does not read and is proudly ignorant. He possesses no ideology. Beyond greed, how much of Trump's behavior is a function of his own desires and how much is because of manipulation by others?

Lee: It's a form of co-dependence. It is a mutual phenomenon where you have a person who is mentally disordered. Trump would have remained psychologically disordered as an individual, and therefore not doing much harm, if he had just remained a private citizen. As a real estate builder and a reality TV personality, Trump's power to do harm to society would be vastly limited. But because he rose to the level of president of the United States, this is why I and other health professionals have a medical obligation to speak publicly, to sound the alarm about this whole situation. Donald Trump is the center of vast levels of harm being done to a wide segment of society. This is a public health and public safety issue.

The health paradigm has no room for politics. This has nothing to do with politics. Our concerns are purely about public health and safety, and whether or not American society will choose a destructive route versus a life-affirming, constructive route. Disease by definition is destructive. What we are witnessing with Donald Trump's presidency are all signs of destruction. These symptoms are the dismantling of democracy, rampant corruption, thwarting the rule of law and even the loss of a shared sense of what reality actually is.




The ability to distinguish what is real from what is unreal is very important. With mental pathology, the afflicted person starts to see delusions and hallucinations as real. This mentally unwell person will actually do whatever they can to bulldoze over reality as it actually exists and the people who believe in it. This is why a sick, delusional person will force family members and those around them to abandon their own sense of reality and espouse the sick person's delusions and conspiracy theories.

This is what Donald Trump is doing to the United States and the American people. People who have their grounding in reality and rationality are now losing ground to him.

DeVega: Recently Donald Trump threatened a list of public servants with charges of treason, a crime which is punishable by death. Trump did this out of apparent rage at the Mueller report. A few days before, Trump paraded out all his sycophants to say that Nancy Pelosi is a liar and that he had not thrown a temper tantrum during a recent meeting with her-- despite witnesses who confirm those accounts. One would think that a healthy person would be cowed by the Mueller report and now proceed with great caution. Instead, Donald Trump is acting even worse.

Lee: A mentally unwell person like Donald Trump can no longer see reality for what it is. Instead he has to believe in false beliefs. A person like him has to lie to himself and lie to others. They have to distort the truth. They have to espouse conspiracy theories in order to even tolerate existing in this world, let alone facing reality. A mentally unwell person like Trump cannot accept facts for what they are. He cannot accept the results of the Mueller report as they are. People around Trump sense this.

That is why Attorney General Barr, who is supposed to represent the law, actually distorted the law in order to buttress and protect Donald Trump. Perhaps Barr thought this ploy was necessary for Trump to continue on mentally? Trump would likely not be able to accept the Mueller report if it was presented to him factually. I have been highlighting this fact repeatedly: There is institutional complicity with the leader, who is the center of power in a destructive regime.

DeVega: You and your colleagues have done something that is likely unprecedented in American history. You convened a panel of the world's leading mental health experts to evaluate the president, based on the findings of a special prosecutor's report. What were the conclusions?

Lee: We assembled a group of renowned mental health experts as quickly as possible. We combed through the Mueller report and treated it like the information that we generally have when a court orders us to do a mental capacity evaluation of a person who has shown a lack of mental capacity. This could be a military officer, a police officer or a chief executive officer-- anyone who has been flagged by any of their employees or employers because they show signs of possessing an inability to carry out their duties.

Of course the president has his own employers, who are the American people, who have pointed this out. Other specialists have highlighted these concerns about Trump as well. In essence the group of experts we assembled to evaluate Donald Trump were volunteering as expert witnesses in this case, working pro bono in order to provide a formal conclusion to the people and other concerned parties.

With the Mueller report and other information, we believed that we had enough to come to a conclusion. But we wanted to give the president enough of an opportunity to submit to a personal examination. If Trump believes himself fit to be president, we believe he should submit to an examination. We have information that Donald Trump received our request but he did not respond affirmatively. We then issued our conclusion after the three-week period. Our conclusion was damning. The president failed to meet all four criteria that we outlined as the standard, most basic criteria for mental capacity.

The first specific criterion is the ability to take in important information and advice. To be capable of taking in new information to make decisions, given how that is one of the primary and most important roles of a president.

The second criterion is the ability to process that information unimpeded by emotional needs or false beliefs or the need to lie to yourself or others. The ability to simply use the information you have and process it in ways that are normal, unimpeded by all those other emotional factors and needs.

The third criterion is to be able to make sound, rational, reality-based decisions without undue influence by impulsivity, other false beliefs, delusions and conspiracy theories. It's the ability to stay with a decision in a stable way and not to go back and forth depending on the other influences you receive. In essence, to be sane, to be connected to reality.

The fourth is to not put yourself and others in danger. This includes not inciting people to commit dangerous acts. Not to engage in aggressive acts yourself. Not to threaten nations by inciting war. We have found that President Trump was not able to refrain from those acts in many circumstances. Trump has put himself and the nation in danger, and putting yourself or others in danger is also a very important criterion in determining a person's capacity to serve-- in this case, Trump's fitness to be president. There is overwhelming evidence in the Mueller report showing that Donald Trump is not able to meet these criteria. Likewise, there is very little evidence showing that Donald Trump is able to meet those criteria.

DeVega: Do you think that Donald Trump should be impeached? What advice would you give Nancy Pelosi if she reached out to you?

Lee: I do not involve myself in direct discussions about impeachment or the political process because that is outside of my realm of expertise. My expertise is medical. In that capacity I can state that unless Donald Trump is contained or removed, he is posing a danger to public health and safety. As president, Trump represents a condition of imminent danger to the country and the world. Therefore my recommendation is that Donald Trump be immediately contained and certain powers are taken away from him.

I would like to highlight two of our greatest concerns. Immediate removal from access to nuclear weapons. The fact that an individual with access to thousands of nuclear weapons which have the capacity to destroy humanity and the world many times over is certainly an unacceptable situation with Donald Trump's level of mental incapacity. The war-making powers are vested in a president. We ask that Donald Trump's ability to make war be removed because he certainly is not in a position to have such powers.

DeVega: What do you think is most likely to happen next with Donald Trump, if his behavior continues along this path?

Lee: We can be quite certain of certain things based on probability and Donald Trump's pattern of behavior. The American people will be in far greater danger. With Donald Trump there will be unacceptable levels of danger of him either destroying the United States or perhaps even human civilization. Donald Trump is a national emergency. That should be the No. 1 priority at this time. The American people and the country's leaders are not treating this dire situation with the attention it demands. The fact that this is not being treated as a national and global emergency is the greatest sign of danger.

And there's more, that the shrinks gathered about the mentally unstable occupant of the White House. "The Special Counsel’s report, they wrote in the report, "provides an uncommon wealth of information regarding the President’s mental capacity, begging for a mental health interpretation. Pursuant to our ongoing, primary professional responsibility to society to protect public health and wellbeing, and to warn against potential dangers to the public’s safety and security, we have embarked upon this report. Mental capacity refers to the mental soundness that is necessary to fulfill a task and is a fundamental and necessary component of fitness for duty. It is a functional, not a diagnostic, assessment, focused less on the President’s personal mental health than on his capacity to fulfill the duties of his office as observed by co-workers and close associates. The information in the Special Counsel’s report, deriving from multiple sources under sworn testimony, yields an assessment with uncommonly high confidence. We found evidence in the report of:

1. Compromises in comprehension, or inability to take in critical information and advice;

2. Faulty information processing, in the form of mendacity, rigidity, self-occupied notions of “fairness,” and poor memory;

3. Interferences to sound decision making, including loss of impulse control, recklessness, and inability to consider consequences; and

4. Proneness to placing himself and others in danger, including encouraging, recommending, or inciting violence on the part of his followers.

"[W]e we believe that the preponderance of evidence overwhelmingly supports the conclusion that this President is incapable of making sound, rational, reality-based decisions free of impulsivity, recklessness, paranoid and other demonstrably false beliefs, with most notably an absorption in self-interest that precludes the consideration of national interest. These characteristics not only affect the overall unfitness of this President; they also indicate a profound danger to national and international security in the nuclear age. Whereas we would still like to see the results of a proper, in-person evaluation, as stated above, a personal interview does not necessarily yield the most useful information in a functional assessment. In fact, we believe that we already have enough information to conclude that the President lacks the mental capacity to discharge the duties of his office, and that his incapacity in these respects represents a profound risk to public health and safety... While the information in the Special Counsel’s report has been deemed insufficient for criminal determination, it provides, even in redacted form, a wealth of relevant information regarding the President’s mental capacity. Not having the mental capacity to make sound decisions and to refrain from violence, whether by encouraging, recommending, or inciting it on the part of his followers, whether or not he meets the criteria for being diagnosed as mentally ill, is dangerous as long as he remains President and constitutes a medical emergency that health professionals are obligated to respond to... The Special Counsel’s report offers an extraordinary level of high-quality information on the President’s apparent lack of mental capacity: compromises in comprehension (inability to take in critical information and advice), faulty information processing (mendacity, rigidity, self-occupied notions of 'fairness,' and poor memory), interferences to sound decision making (loss of impulse control, recklessness, and inability to consider consequences), and proneness to placing himself and others in danger."