President Donald Trump's mental health has long been the source of consternation, but a popular psychotherapist is going viral for raising alarms about one particularly concerning comment recently made by the president.
"During a recent 60 Minutes interview, Donald Trump was asked a very poignant question about his hatred of his enemies, and his answer says a lot about his psychology," American psychotherapist Elliott Connie explained in an Instagram video on Monday. "As a practicing psychotherapist, whenever I refer to the potentiality that Donald Trump is a narcissist, I always have to make sure I say that I have not done a thorough assessment of Donald Trump, so thus I cannot confirm such a diagnosis. However, if I were to do that kind of assessment, narcissistic personality disorder would be high on the list of things I’d be considering. And comments like this are exactly why."
Connie added, "The fact that he can maintain his hatred of his enemies, even when facing the judgment of God, is exactly the kind of mentality that narcissists hold. Because what’s happening there is he’s willing to hate people that acknowledge his hatred might be wrong. If you are facing God in this context, and God is saying hatred is wrong, and if you denounce said hatred, I will let you into paradise, and he’s saying, 'I still can’t do it,' he’s literally saying that he is more important than God in relationship to making that decision. He is not willing to put down his hatred for anyone or any entity."
Noting that his enemies did nothing but criticize him or do their jobs in holding him accountable, Connie said "that says a whole lot about his personality and shares a little bit about how maybe narcissistic personality disorder is at play here, because most people, even when they’re angry, most people can say, 'You know what? I can’t forgive somebody.' Most people can say, 'Yeah, even though I don’t like them, I see some good quality about them.' And for most people to get to that level of hatred, the person who you hate would have had to do something much more significant than simply criticize you or simply attempt to hold you accountable, given that holding you accountable is actually their job."
When Connie said that he was reluctant to officially diagnose Trump as a "malignant narcissist," he was likely referring to the Goldwater Rule, an APA guideline which prohibits members from pathologically assessing people they have never met clinically. Speaking to AlterNet in October, Dr. Jacob M. Appel, a bioethicist and expert on the health of American presidents, said he disagrees with the Goldwater Rule.
"One of the problems with the Goldwater Rule is that it was designed in an era when the public had much less access to public figures, and therefore they were relying on secondhand information," Appel told AlterNet at the time. "Now, as you said, they can watch the president. But also, the public has no sense of the difference between psychologists and psychiatrists, and for that matter, between psychiatrists and other medical doctors. And the Goldwater Rule applies not just to psychiatrists, but only to psychiatrists who are part of the American Psychiatric Association. Psychiatrists who are not part of the association, psychologists and neurologists go on television all the time and make diagnoses about public figures. So the rule is deeply antiquated and restricts the public from gaining useful information."
Dr. Henry Abraham, a psychiatrist formerly of Tufts University, compared Trump to a man losing his mind in a supermarket line when speaking to AlterNet in October.
"I like to use the metaphor here of a man in a supermarket," Abraham told AlterNet. "He's getting in line in a supermarket, and he has a basket full of food, and he smashes it into the woman in front of him, because she has more food than he does and it's going to take a long time and he's in a rush — and what's she doing buying so much food, and get out of the way, and she's a terrible person, and I'm really in a rush and I'm far more important than she is. And he pushes it, and he really shoves her with the shopping cart. Now, if you saw that, you would say — well, you'd probably call the police, because it's really a bizarre kind of thing. But that's the whole point. It's a bizarre kind of thing. It's crazy. It's a red flag."
