Trump in 'excellent health,' White House doctor says.

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Liberals are the most hateful group I ever met...

Undoing an election based on the judgement of psychologists/psychiatrists, Wow. Who would appoint these people to have such an awesome responsibility? We have had multiple chances not to have this happen. There are procedures that involve elected officials for getting rid of him.

Everything can’t be fixed, sometimes mistakes are made whose consequences are horrific and irreversible.

So, you're a doctor then. I didn't know. What makes YOU qualified to speak about things like this? Would you have said any of what you do in your post about Presidents Obama or Clinton?

Well, I happen to believe (even though, like yourself, I am not a psychiatrist) that President Trump is in perfect health mentally. Physically too. I don't know this for sure, and I am by no means qualified to assess him like this, but... well, that's what I believe, so it must be true.

I never said undoing an election. I meant an assessment of his present state of mental health & if he's unfit he should be removed from office under the 25th Amendment for the good of the USA, it's citizens, and everyone else on the planet that likes living in a non-nuclear wasteland.

[b]Perry Wilson, MD: In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association came forward with what would be called the "Goldwater Rule," which stated that it would be unethical for psychiatrists to attempt to diagnose public figures from afar. Nevertheless, the Trump presidency has prompted a resurgence of psychiatric diagnosis from both professionals and laypeople. Dr. Allen Frances is the former Chair of Psychiatry at the Duke University School of Medicine. He's also the author of Twilight of American Sanity: A Psychiatrist Analyzes the Age of Trump. Dr. Frances, thank you for joining me on Doc-to-Doc.

Allen Frances, MD: My pleasure.

Wilson: You authored the DSM criteria for narcissistic personality disorder. This is something that many people have attributed to President Trump. You are not one of them. Do you stand by the assertion that he does not have this disorder?

Frances: Well, Trump is absolutely a world-class narcissist. He has every criteria met except for two. In addition to having the features of being grandiose, unempathic, self-involved, selfish, all the things that go into being Trump, you have to have distress or impairment, significant distress or impairment.

Trump is a man who causes immense distress in others, but doesn't seem to experience it very much himself. Although he's created tremendous impairment for our country and for his business colleagues, he, himself, has been very well rewarded in politics and also in business for being a narcissist. I think that it's reckless for people to attribute the damage he's causing to mental illness. He's much more bad than mad.

Wilson: Almost every type of mental illness is characterized by this fact: It affects your life in a negative way. I think you're making the argument that if you're the president, you have done pretty well for yourself -- which most of us would agree with -- but it reminds me of Nixon's famous quote when he said, "If the president does it, it's not illegal." Can the president have a mental illness or by the virtue of his success, does that take mental illness off the table?

Frances: We've had two amazing leaders the last century ... who had real severe mental illness. Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill both suffered from classic clinical depression that no one would doubt. You can be a terrific leader and have a very severe mental illness, at least intermittently, in part of your life. But I think the issue with Trump is that he's just an incompetent, blustering, deceitful conman. No one has ever been less suited for the presidency of the United States, and we shouldn't confuse his bad behavior with mental illness.
To lump Trump with the mentally ill is a tremendous insult to them. It stigmatizes them. Most people who are mentally ill are well meaning and well behaved, and really fine people. Trump is none of those. So that when we confuse mental illness with bad behavior, we, first of all, insult the mentally ill, and secondly, we underestimate just how evil Trump is and how dangerous.

Wilson: What is it about him that prompts people to even speculate as opposed to just saying, "Oh, well, this guy might not be an effective leader?"

Frances: Well, first of all, there was a lot of concern about Richard Nixon along the lines of him being quite paranoid. Appropriate concern. I think the thing about Trump is that he's completely irresponsible, quite ignorant, impulsive, insulting, corrupt, self-serving, that he'll say and do anything at the whim of the moment. But I think we confuse the behaviors of a trickster and a conman with real mental illness. I think it makes us ineffective in dealing with him. The taming of Trump will be a political taming. It won't be psychiatric name calling. Trump will not be removed from office under the 25th amendment because he's unfit psychiatrically. That would require Pence and the majority of the cabinet voting him unable to continue in office. That will never happen. He may well be impeached, but he won't be removed from office on psychiatric grounds.
Meanwhile, we're missing the point. Congress has to tame Trump. Congress has to make sure that no one man, especially someone so unstable and so selfish as Trump, can press the nuclear button or start war with Korea. Congress has to take over the right to declare war, which presidents have abused frequently in the last 50 years. I think it's a political problem. The public is responsible. The public has to demonstrate against the reductions in medical coverage, against Trump's terribly unfair tax proposals.
The government of the United States will be turning over in 2018. The public has a responsibility to make sure that more responsible people are in charge. So the taming of Trump, the defensive democracy, the return to sane national policies, that's a political problem. Impotent, psychiatric name calling misuses psychiatric diagnosis insults patients and Trump isn't bothered by it. If he were bothered by it, he'd be tweeting about the psychiatrists. He couldn't care less.

Wilson: Let me play devil's advocate here. Clearly, you're not a fan of the president. You want congress to take action against him. Wouldn't a consensus from psychiatrists saying, "Something isn't right here," at the very least provide them more political cover for doing what you believe needs to be done than just saying, "Oh, well, this is a guy who makes some bad decisions?" Wouldn't that help them if a prominent psychiatrist came and said, "I have concerns about this guy's rationality?"

Frances: Well, I think that there's nothing about Trump that isn't completely transparent. He may well be the most transparent person who ever lived. His behavior, his outrageous taking advantage of other people, his conspiracy theories, all of these go back 45 years. It's not as if he's a different person now than when he was in his 20s. He's certainly no different now than when he was running for office.

The American public bought this and now they must have buyer's remorse. Attributing this to mental illness makes it sound like Trump is a one off and that it's all his problem. I think that's a mistake. I think that Trump is a mirror on our soul and this is a shock treatment kind of moment where we should be wondering about ourselves. What's wrong with us that we could possibly put the future of mankind, the future of our children and our grandchildren in someone this reckless? So, I think this is an important opportunity for society to take stock of ourselves, not to just make the false claim that it's one man's mental illness.

all unelected people deciding to remove a person that was elected but undoing an election?

Do you have a better idea about how Trump can get the orange off his face?

Anyways I thought liberals were supposed to be against body shaming.

Liberals are the most hateful group I ever met...

well we hate...hate.

Except for your own party approved hate...

There's something fundamentally wrong with anyone who thinks that White supremacists and neo-Nazis are "very fine people."

Except for your own party approved hate...