TRUMP'S 'MENTAL IMPAIRMENT MEANS HE CANNOT THINK STRATEGICALLY OR IN ABSTRACT TERMS,' CLAIMS PROFESSOR OF PSYCHIATRY
BY SHANE CROUCHER ON 10/24/19 AT 3:46 AM EDT
psychiatry professor claimed President Donald Trump is so mentally impaired that he cannot think in abstract terms and can only view things in a one-dimensional way.
Several experts in the areas of psychology and psychiatry have voiced concerns about Trump's mental well-being. While some argue that it is important to do so given the global importance of the U.S. presidency and the power wielded by the office, critics say you cannot make a proper assessment or diagnosis without a face-to-face session.
"He cannot weigh options, assess risk, or foresee consequences. Concepts like fairness, justice, honor, and integrity quite literally do not register. You can see this in every interview or press encounter. He never states an abstract thought or idea.
"Instead he falls back on simple adjectives: disgraceful, horrible, low-intelligence, perfect, innocent, nasty, stupid, fake, etc. He's driven by negative emotion, often paranoid and often insulting, vulgar, vitriolic."
UT Southwestern said Talmadge was speaking in a personal capacity.
Talmadge wrote that Trump expresses positivity in a "shallow tone" using "childish adjectives" and is non-specific when discussing plans or projects.
"The meaning of this is clear. Trump does not have a vision or a plan, because he can think only in concrete, elementary, childlike, one dimensional terms. He does not process an abstract idea like American forces stabilizing a multilateral conflict with geopolitical implications," Talmadge wrote.
"This Trumpian brain failure is hard for normal people to understand because for normal people, abstract thought is natural, baked in, largely unnoticed. Normal people see the consequences, assess risk, make rational decisions most of the time.
"What is true today is that Trump is not normal, Trump is mentally impaired, Trump cannot think normally, and Trump is dangerous. When he is removed from office he literally will not understand what happened. He will have to make up a story, tell lies, and rant about Hillary's DNC server."
Earlier in October, Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, suggested that Trump should be detained involuntarily to assess his mental health.
It followed a tweet by Trump in which he claimed he would "totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey (I've done before!)" if Turkey did anything that "I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits."
"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 wrote on Twitter.
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Last year, Bandy Lee, a Yale psychiatrist, told Newsweek that a longtime Trump family friend approached her with concerns about the president's well-being. She also said two officials from the administration did the same.
Lee wrote in a piece for The Conversation that Trump displayed "psychological symptoms reflective of emotional compulsion, impulsivity, poor concentration, narcissism and recklessness."
In a recent article for The Atlantic, George Conway, an attorney and former Republican who is married to senior White House adviser Kellyanne Conway, detailed at length the evidence that Trump is mentally unfit to hold his office.
"Simply put, Trump's ingrained and extreme behavioral characteristics make it impossible for him to carry out the duties of the presidency in the way the Constitution requires," Conway wrote.
"The question is whether he can possibly act as a public fiduciary for the nation's highest public trust… Given that Trump displays the extreme behavioral characteristics of a pathological narcissist, a sociopath, or a malignant narcissist—take your pick—it's clear that he can't."
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