The DSM and the DOPUS – Blame it on the drugs update

According to Allen Frances, M.D., author of the diagnostic criteria for narcissistic personality disorder, tRump is many things:

• Incompetent
• Deceitful
• A conman
• Irresponsible
• Quite ignorant
• Impulsive
• Insulting
• Corrupt
• Self-serving
• Unstable
• Dangerous
• Evil

But, he isn’t suffering from narcissistic personality disorder, or any other form of mental illness.

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.

[…]

Frances: We’ve had two amazing leaders the last century and this 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.

One gets the impression that Dr. Frances is not a fan of the DOPUS.

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.

It’s also a cop-out.

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 people I see calling him crazy are a mixed bag: People who are freaked out and trying to make sense of an alarming and erratic person. Lazy pundits. People who don’t want to admit that their friends/family/colleagues knowingly voted for a white supremacist dirtbag, and calling him crazy somehow makes them less culpable.

And there are people who seem to think that if they call tRump crazy often enough, orderlies will show up with a straight-jacket that has the words 25th Amendment embroidered across the back, and take him away.

That’s not going to happen, it won’t make the #StupidestPresidentEver’s tenure less awful, and it won’t do anything to keep the GOP’s next nightmare out of the White House.

Update – In addition to mental illness, many people suggest Dump is exhibiting signs of dementia. I would suggest drug abuse is an equally valid theory. Is it really that difficult to imagine that a vain, rich abusive dickhead also plows through a few lines of coke on a regular basis? No. It is not.

If states really want to scare him away from running next year, they should make random pee-pee tests a requirement for getting on the ballot.