By Hugh Winig, M.D.
Dr. Winig is a retired psychiatrist and longtime OLLI @Berkeley member and volunteer
Nearly everyone in America today is struggling with some aspect of emotional instability. And we all appreciate that the alterations in our lives from the combination of a world-wide pandemic as well as severe political dysfunction threatens our emotional comfort as well as our democracy. Personal, family, occupational, and community connections and involvement have been severely negatively impacted for just about every one of us over the past few years, and the freedoms we previously took for granted are no longer guaranteed.
Back in October 2016, I stated that the source of peoples’ rising emotional discomfort then should be referred to as “TIAD” (Trump Induced Anxiety Disorder), a humorous attempt at reducing peoples’ rising anxiety. I reassured people that this new disorder would dissipate immediately when, two weeks later, Hillary Clinton would be elected America’s first woman President.
But what has happened since that unexpected election result in 2016 is what I will now refer to as “TIDD” (Trump Induced Delusional Disorder), and there is nothing humorous whatsoever about the emotional symptoms that are plaguing a substantial number of our fellow citizens as a result.
Most psychiatrists and many others as well understood back in 2016 that the then Presidential candidate was an authoritarian and psychopathic personality and suffered from other psychiatric symptoms including delusions of grandeur and malignant narcissism.
Beginning on Day 1 of his term, the newly elected President falsely claimed that the size of the crowd at his inauguration was larger than that of President Obama. This was likely a delusion because the pictures comparing the two events showed nothing to support this statement, and in fact revealed the exact opposite. This distorted thinking continued during his term in office up to and including when he was defeated in the November 2020 election nearly four years later. At that time, and continuing to this very day, the former President continues to claim that he won the election despite all facts and evidence to the contrary.
The former President is likely both a pathological liar, as most psychopaths are, and suffers as well from delusions of grandeur, as many psychiatrically disturbed people can exhibit. The problem is that this ongoing distortion of reality that he really won the 2020 election has now been adopted by a significant percentage of the American populace. This kind of shared delusion is well known to psychiatrists and is termed “folie a deux” if only two people share a delusion. When a large group share a delusion, there is an expression that “they drank the Kool-Aid”, which dates back to1978 when 900 followers of Jim Jones of The Peoples Temple in Jonestown, Guyana participated in “revolutionary suicide” by drinking a powdered drink laced with cyanide leading to mass deaths of his devoted aides and followers at Jones’ command.
What we are observing now in this immediate past President is likely a mixture of severe character pathology as well as delusions of grandeur. These delusions have now expanded into a shared group delusion such that a large percentage of his followers appear to believe the lie that he won this past election.
The American psyche has thus been badly damaged. Our country’s capacity to heal from being exposed to this “psychiatric virus” for over four years may have had as negative an impact as the Covid virus, the worst viral worldwide pandemic to arise in the last 100 years.
As responsible citizens we have three ways to combat these simultaneous stressors: 1) care for ourselves and family’s emotional well being in whatever ways are constructive, 2) actively pursue civic involvement to protect our democracy from the above challenges, and 3) use our intellect and learning powers to understand these historic matters in a way that helps us combat the sense of helplessness that can be damaging to our psyches.
Onward and upward in our pursuit of knowledge to better understand our society and our lives!