Is The President Nuts? The Goldwater Rule & Donald Trump

Writing in a national security and the law blog, Harvard professor of law and psychiatry Alan Stone reviews the recently published “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.” It would be safe to say that Stone is not on board. His review, titled “The Psychiatrist’s Goldwater Rule in the Trump Era,” looks back at the origin of that rule, a provision in  the American Psychiatric Association’s code of ethics that says it’s unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a “professional opinion” about a public figure without having conducted an examination and being given “proper authorization.” Stone explains that the Goldwater Rule came about after what some termed “The Goldwater Scandal.” Shortly before the 1964 presidential election, the avid anti-Goldwater editor of the magazine called “Fact” polled 12,356 psychiatrists, asking them to opine on whether or not Goldwater was psychologically fit to be president. A substantial majority of respondents said he was not. Goldwater later sued, and he won, and it must be said, Stone writes, “that in the years that followed, it became clear to everyone who knew him that Goldwater was neither mentally ill nor suffering from major psychoses, as America’s leading psychiatrists had diagnosed him.” Quite obviously no fan of Donald Trump, Stone goes on to explore the in and outs of the current movement that would declare Trump psychologically unfit and how it’s reflected in the contributions to the anthology under review. While acknowledging that some of the contributions are ‘thoughtful and ethically nuanced,” by and large he finds the effort to be on shaky ground. That said, Stone concludes his review by citing with approval the book’s epilogue, in which Noam Chomsky opines that the two greatest threats to the planet are global warming and nuclear holocaust, and Trump is a menace on both counts. “You do not,” Stone concludes, “ have to be a psychiatrist to believe that.”