Members of the mental-health profession would like to remind us that this is their job, not ours. Consider The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President...advocates dismiss or sidestep the Goldwater rule on the grounds that mental-health professionals can and should 'warn' Americans about Mr. Trump’s mental unfitness for the presidency ... We learn from the essays collected here that these behaviors may be manifestations of various neuroses...the authors differ in their diagnoses does not give one great confidence in the field of psychiatry or, indeed, in the book’s value ... It’s striking, in any case, how many of these authors sound a little — how to say it nicely? — paranoid.
The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump features more than two dozen essays breaking down the president’s perceived traits, which the contributors find consistent with symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder, sociopathy and other maladies ...argue that Trump’s behavior — his political statements and actions as well as his interviews, books and social-media activity — suggest more ominous possibilities ...writers emphasize that they are not, technically, diagnosing the president ... The stand these psychiatrists are taking takes courage, and their conclusions are compelling. But it’s hard to read The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump as simply the dispassionate insights of well-trained experts.
The president is dangerous, and likely mentally unfit for office. That’s the hard truth of the essay collection The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President ... Originally conceived as a traditional publication of proceedings, it grew in scope once the popular interest became clear ...seeks to answer a question many have been asking since Trump announced his candidacy: Is he crazy like a fox, or just crazy? ...strongest moments are when the authors go beyond symptoms and behavior markers, and illuminate Donald Trump’s dangerousness — and the extreme risk of keeping him in office ... The Dangerous Case might leave the reader wishing for a more actionable next step.
Contributors to the book entertain the possibility of applying a variety of diagnoses and descriptions to the President ... Behind the obvious political leanings of the authors lurks a conceptual problem. Definitions of mental illness are mutable; they vary from culture to culture and change with time ... Psychiatrists who contributed to The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump are moved by the sense that they have a special knowledge they need to communicate to the public. But Trump is not their patient ... None of this is secret, special knowledge — it is all known to the people who voted for him. We might ask what’s wrong with them rather than what’s wrong with him.
...The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, is an anthology of essays primarily written by mental health professionals following a Yale conference about the 'duty to warn'... These essays argue all kinds of things, but primarily they assert that not only is Trump crazy, he is dangerous and making the rest of us crazy, too ...far more surprising and interesting text...greatest contribution is that it could help end the endless discussion of the Goldwater rule... All of this analysis is alarming, but very little of it is new ...this last section that the book feels most useful — not because it offers a 25th Amendment – like path for escape, but because in taking the time to explain the forces surrounding Trump, it imparts some smaller, but more specific lessons.
...with the release of a new book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, these thin notions around the president’s instability are fortified for the first time, invigorating the probes surrounding the mental health of the president ...introduces 27 psychiatrists and mental health experts who make the case that 'anyone as mentally unstable as this man should not be entrusted with the life-and-death-powers of the presidency' ...conscience-clearing, but a deeper look reveals a new way to discuss just how volatile Trump and the American way of life has become ...they find consistent with narcissistic personality disorder, sociopathy, paranoia, hypomania, and other illnesses ...book exists to change the course of the public’s conversation around Trump’s mental health, from a dialogue centered on diatribes calling him childish or a clown to one that centers his perpetuation of 'malignant normality' ...illustrating how Trump is not a recent creation but the apotheosis of a collective American narcissism.
Editor Lee asked for and received submissions for this book within a three-week period, and several of them show signs of being written in haste. Many of the contributors are leading psychologists or psychiatrists... volume is aimed strictly at demonstrating that Trump shouldn’t be in office (admittedly a view held by tens of millions of other Americans) and that a panel of mental health professionals should be established to determine his lack of fitness ... Read collectively, the essays become repetitious: the contributors lean on the same definitions of narcissism and paranoia and cite the same tweets and passages from speeches, most of which will already be familiar to readers ...this one will shore up the opinions of those already convinced of his lack of fitness for the job but won’t change the minds of his supporters, the vast majority of whom won’t read it.
