By Hugh Winig, M.D.
Dr. Winig is a retired psychiatrist and a longtime OLLI @Berkeley member and volunteer
An earlier post of mine, "My Crazy Uncle," expressed my thoughts as a retired psychiatrist with forensic experience about what I thought was the psychiatric affliction that our then President suffered from. This conclusion was based on the extreme behaviors he was displaying that were apparent for all to observe.
The American Psychiatric Association cautions psychiatrists not to formally speculate on individual politician’s behavior unless they have personally evaluated that individual. The result of that admonition was that the psychiatric community at large remained essentially silent in the face of what was already apparent as a chronic and disabling psychiatric condition that our then president suffered from.
This chronic psychiatric condition has now wrought disruption to our society not only throughout his 4 years in office but also during these past 18 months out of office, and this dysfunctional behavior continues to preoccupy our nation and will likely continue to do so in the future.
Our then president should have been removed from office under the 25th Amendment early on. That amendment states that a president can be removed from office because of suffering from a condition leading to “disability or incapacitation.” His preexisting and chronic psychiatric condition was apparent from Day 1 when he claimed his inauguration crowd was vastly bigger than that of his predecessor despite obvious pictorial evidence to the contrary. And our past president remains delusional to this day about winning the 2020 election, as well as acting in mafia-like sociopathic ways as is included in my diagnosis of him termed “Malignant Narcissistic Personality Disorder with Psychopathic Features”, as described in the psychiatric diagnostic manual.
This disruption to our country could have been avoided by enacting the 25th Amendment early on, which would have been appropriate even back in 2017. But since then the country has seen him impeached twice and now continues to hear about his profound self-serving assault on our democracy. This is a result of the failure to have utilized the existing 25th amendment in our constitution and an outright failure of politicians to have acted appropriately to protect our fragile democracy.
Unfortunately, the end is not yet in sight, so stay tuned!
Hugh Winig, M.D. is a retired psychiatrist, the author of a book of short stories and a book of humanistic aphorisms. He was a founding Trustee of the Lafayette Library and Learning Center and a past President of the East Bay Psychiatric Association. He is a longtime OLLI @Berkeley member, volunteer, and contributor to our blog.