Tag: Trump mental health

Yale psychiatrist: Trump’s 53-minute Fox rant is yet another dangerous sign of his worsening mental state

AlterNet logoPerhaps unsurprisingly, the White House doctor said of Donald Trump’s recent, sudden visit to Walter Reed Hospital: “Despite some speculation, the President … did not undergo any specialized cardiac or neurologic evaluations.” You don’t have to be a medical professional to recognize that the patterns of the unscheduled visit, interrupting the weekend on a Saturday evening, conform more closely to a medical emergency than a routine check-up. Just as the reality of Mr. Trump’s corruption and criminality is catching up with him through the impeachment hearings, the reality of his mental and physical condition cannot help but catch up with him.

Some of this was on full display in his highly concerning, 53-minute breathless outpour of grievances that his interview with Fox and Friends on Friday morning became. He reverted to conspiracy theories—as he often does under stress—of Barack Obama’s wire surveillance of him, a coup in the works from the beginning, and the claim that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 election and had a secret DNC server. Continue reading “Yale psychiatrist: Trump’s 53-minute Fox rant is yet another dangerous sign of his worsening mental state”

Trump’s self-destructive diet: Psychiatrist explains how unhealthy food choices may affect president’s mental health

AlterNet logoPresident Donald Trump’s well-documented eating habits are far from what a nutritionist would deem ideal. The most powerful man in the world often skips breakfast. When he does eat the most important meal of the day, he opts for bacon, McDonald’s Egg McMuffins or “made in the USA” cereals high in sugar.

When Trump visits McDonald’s for lunch or dinner, his go-to order for one meal ⁠— two Big Macs, two Filet-O-Fish and a chocolate shake ⁠— clocks in at 2,390 calories. He might chase that with up to 12 Diet Cokes a day. The president’s love of the iconic American fast-food chain is reportedly motivated at least in part by a fear of being poisoned. That’s just one quirk in a highly quirky diet.

Sometimes Trump goes for stretches of up to 16 hours without eating. He prefers his steak “so well done” that “it would rock on the plate.” He eats two common finger foods — fried chicken and pizza — with a fork. He is rumored to think Ore-Ida fries are “perfect.” And you better believe that he gets two scoops of ice cream for dessert, while dinner guests get just one.

View the complete November 4 article by Joseph Neese from Salon on the AlterNet website here.

Is Trump close to a psychotic break? Harvard psychiatrist on the president’s downward spiral — and why his paranoia may persuade him to leave office

AlterNet logoDonald Trump’s mental health is a national and global emergency.

He has shown himself to be a malignant narcissist and a habitual liar. The Washington Post’s ongoing tally of Trump lies is now at almost 14,000. These are not “misstatements” or “gaffes” or the semi-harmful utterances of a fabulist: Donald Trump behaves like a pathological liar.

Republican leaders and others in Trump’s inner circle know that he is mentally unwell. They speak of that fact in hushed tones and in “off the record” conversations with reporters. This is but another example of how Trump’s Republicans are more loyal to power, and to him, than they are the country’s well-being.

View the complete October 29 article by Chauncey DeVega from Salon on the AlterNet website here.

Acclaimed Harvard psychologist on Trump’s ‘alarming’ claim of ‘unmatched wisdom’: ‘Wouldn’t these normally trigger a mental health hold?’

AlterNet logoPresident Donald Trump shocked the U.S. military and security officials over the weekend with the announcement that he would be withdrawing U.S. troops from northeastern Syria — where they have been working with Kurdish-led forces. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan confirmed the news, although Trump warned on Twitter that he will “totally destroy and obliterate the economy of Turkey” if “Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits.” And Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert (who hosts the PBS series “This Emotional Life”) found that tweet disturbing, saying that it seriously raises questions about Trump’s mental health.

Monday on Twitter, Gilbert posted, “Am I the only psychologist who finds this claim and this threat truly alarming? Wouldn’t these normally trigger a mental health hold? Right and left must set aside politics and agree that there is a serious problem here.”

Gilbert’s tweet inspired a lot of responses. Author Adrian Bethune posted, “You don’t even need to be a psychologist to reach that conclusion.” @Woman_on_Pause tweeted, “I am beyond alarmed. Doesn’t take a Ph.D. to realize this man is and has been off the rails mentally.” And @zaphirax posted, “It’s no more insane than when he proclaimed to be ‘The Chosen One’ and retweeted that he was God the King of Israel.”

View the complete October 7 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.

Trump is ‘having a full-blown mental breakdown’ and needs to resign: Trump ex-staffer

AlterNet logoLeading Republican elected officials should work with President Donald Trump’s family to negotiate him resigning from office, a former top White House official suggested on MSNBC on Friday.

Former White House press secretary Anthony Scaramucci blasted his former boss during an interview with Chuck Todd on MSNBC’s “Meet the Press Daily.”

“He has totally and completely lost it. There is nobody that can look at the situation, read the tweets, look at the press sprays, and say he hasn’t lost it,” Scaramucci argued.

View the complete August 24 article by Bob Brigham on the AlterNet website here.

Psychiatrist warns Trump may be ‘at significant risk for deteriorating into full-blown psychosis’

AlterNet logoDonald Trump’s verbal outbursts and Messianic claims of being “the second coming” and “the chosen one” have once again reignited a controversy over just what exactly is wrong with the pr*sident of the United States. Not only did he compare himself to Jesus several times in a single day, Trump also had a lot of trouble with the basic enunciation of words like “obstacle” and “applicable,” called the prime minister of Denmark “nasty” for declining to sell Greenland to the U.S., and declared all Democratic American Jews “disloyal to Israel.”

Whatever Trump’s diagnosis, it’s particularly bleak and dangerous that this man is running the country and in possession of the nuclear codes, among other forms of recourse. Still, people are debating whether Trump is actually psychotic or narcissistic with delusions of grandeur or perhaps suffering from rabid dementia eating away at his brain and making him particularly irritable.

One mental health professional and contributor to the updated version of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump argued Wednesday that Trump isn’t technically psychotic.

View the complete August 23 article by Kerry Eleveld from Daily Kos on the AlterNet website here.

Trump is either descending into madness — or intentionally undermining American national security

AlterNet logoWhenever Donald Trump says or tweets a remark that embarrasses our country before the world, conventional analysis suggests that it is yet another consequence of his infantile narcissism. So we were told again when the president of the United States insulted Denmark, one of the founding nations of NATO and a dedicated American ally, by canceling his scheduled trip to meet with the Danish prime minister — supposedly because she had deemed his scheme to buy Greenland “absurd,” which, of course, it is.

He originally requested to visit Denmark, which made his abrupt, petulant cancelation all the more insulting to the Danes. The usual anonymous sources explained that he had other reasons to break the date, such as his aversion to flying overseas and his aversion to Barack Obama, who is also scheduled to visit Denmark next month.

When Trump appears to lose control — and follows up by suggesting that he is “the chosen one” or “the King of Israel” — it seems natural to worry that he is mentally ill. That is one way to interpret his behavior.

View the complete August 22 article by Joe Conason from Creators Syndicate on the AlterNet website here.

Yale psychiatrist explains why Trump’s aborted Iran attack is a ‘mental health issue’: He ‘failed every criterion of a basic mental capacity evaluation’

AlterNet logoWriting in the New York Times Monday, former national security adviser Susan Rice wondered how the U.S. came to the brink of war with Iran, after President Trump approved and then cancelled air strikes in the span of ten minutes.

“How on earth did we find ourselves 10 minutes from an idiotic war without the president having weighed the consequences?” Rice asks.

“As a former national security adviser who has participated in many decisions about whether and when to use force, I am more certain than ever that our national security decision-making process is dangerously dysfunctional,” she adds.

View the complete June 24 article by Tana Ganeva from Raw Story on the AlterNet website here.

Yale psychiatrist Bandy Lee: Trump’s mental health an ’emergency’

Dr. Bandy Lee convened experts to study the Mueller report. They conclude that Trump “can no longer see reality.”

Robert Mueller’s report is 448 pages long and took almost two years to complete. Nineteen lawyers and at least 40 other people assisted with the investigation. It involved interviews with 500 people. Thirty-four people were indicted, seven have pled guilty and one was convicted at trial. The facts presented are damning: Donald Trump obstructed justice. Trump and his inner circle both publicly and privately sought to collude with Russian agents to influence the 2016 presidential election.

Beyond the particulars of Trump’s likely illegal behavior, the Mueller report is also a compendium of Donald Trump’s state of mind.

Dr. Bandy Lee, who is a professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine and editor of the bestselling book “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump” convened a panel comprised of leading mental health experts to evaluate Donald Trump based upon his behavior as detailed in the Mueller report.

View the complete June 14 article by Chauncey DeVega from Salon on the AlterNet website here.

‘You’re mentally unwell’: George Conway assails Trump in blistering Twitter thread

Anyone who follows George Conway on Twitter knows that the Republican attorney is among President Donald Trump’s most vehement critics on the right. While his wife, GOP activist and Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, is among the president’s staunchest defenders, GC has a totally different point of view — and in a blistering Twitter thread posted over the weekend, GC questioned Trump’s mental health and urged others to do the same.

When Trump tweeted that he had no choice but to “hit back” at the “corrupt media” and “fake news,” Conway responded, “You’re not ‘presidential’ at all, period. You’re mentally unwell. You engage in bizarre, irrational, self-defeating behavior, which prompts criticism of you, which triggers more bizarre, irrational, self-defeating behavior. You would have been fired from any other job by now.”

In his thread, the attorney also posted, “Do yourself and the country a favor. Resign and seek the psychological treatment you so obviously need.” And GC went on to point readers in the direction of some anti-Trump books, including Bandy Lee’s “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President” and Dr. Justin A. Frank’s “Trump on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President” — both of which examine Trump’s mental state.

View the complete June 10 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.