August Is Trump Mental Health Month

If you tuned in to CNN or scanned the homepage of any major media outlet in the past few days, you'll have learned that the people running the asylum are whispering about staging an "intervention" for Donald Trump. 

Reactionaries Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani, for example, have turned into mental health concern trolls practically overnight. They echo the fear running throughout the Establishment that Trump is endangering American military might and exceptionalism by questioning wars and even by verbally jousting with the Gold Star Khan family. 

You might have noticed that these bereaved parents are oddly being described by major media outlets as "Muslim-Americans" rather than as American citizens who emigrated from Pakistan. So many politicians and journalists seem to think that Islam is a country rather than a religion. Did you ever hear anyone described as a Catholic-American, or a Baptist-American, or an Atheist-American? I thought not. Members of the media-political complex themselves need an intervention for their own Orientalism. 

And they also need to be confronted and called out for their own unhealthy greed. After recklessly giving Trump a year and a billion dollars' worth of free campaign advertising, letting him spout his misogyny, racism and xenophobia with reckless abandon, the moral arbiters of America are finally getting serious about Stopping Trump. The corporate media aren't even trying to pretend at anything close to objectivity. First, they red-bait Trump, accusing him without a shred of evidence of being a Russian tool. Now he's a mental case with a hankering to blow up the world, his short fingers just itching to press the red button the minute he enters the White House.

One congress critter has even started a Change. Org online petition, demanding that Trump be professionally screened for a psychiatric disorder. With its graphic depiction of him looking like a character straight out of Dante's Inferno, #Diagnose Trump also serves the dual purpose of demonizing the mentally ill.

In Your Guts You Know He's Nuts

Rep. Karen Ross (D-CA) writes:

Donald Trump is dangerous for our country. His impulsiveness and lack of control over his own emotions are of concern. It is our patriotic duty to raise the question of his mental stability to be the commander in chief and leader of the free world. Mr. Trump appears to exhibit all the symptoms of the mental disorder Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). Mental health professionals need to come forward and urge the Republican party to insist that their nominee has an evaluation to determine his mental fitness for the job. It is entirely possible that some individuals with NPD can successfully function in many careers, but not the Presidency of the United States. We deserve to have the greatest understanding of Mr. Trump's mental health status before we head to the polls on November 8th, 2016. #DiagnoseTrump

You don't need to be a mental health professional to sign Ross's petition. You merely have to be afraid of Trump. As of this writing, more than 10,000 concerned citizens had signed on. Or at least, there are 10,000 signatures. Some could be duplicates signed by sufferers of obsessive-compulsive disorder, or even paid Democratic Party operatives. Maybe Putin or Wikileaks can hack into the Change.Org data base and give us some names.

Here's my take on this latest bout of electoral hysteria. If you force one candidate or politician to undergo a mental health evaluation, then you should require all of them to. Just think about how differently things might have turned out if Ronald Reagan had been screened for early stage Alzheimer's or George W. Bush's brain had been PET-scanned for evidence of alcohol-induced damage.  And then there's Bill Clinton's known sex addiction and Hillary's documented bouts of clinical depression.

As far as Narcissistic Personality Disorder is concerned, I doubt that anybody aspiring to become leader of the "free" world can be entirely immune from it. I'm sure you've seen the checklist:

1. Grandiosity with expectations of superior treatment from others
2. Fixated on fantasies of power, success, intelligence, attractiveness, etc.
3. Self-perception of being unique, superior and associated with high-status people and institutions
4. Needing constant admiration from others
5. Sense of entitlement to special treatment and to obedience from others
6. Exploitative of others to achieve personal gain
7. Unwilling to empathize with others' feelings, wishes, or needs
8. Intensely jealous of others and the belief that others are equally jealous of them
9. Pompous or arrogant demeanor.

Out of curiosity, I Googled "mental health screening," and was gifted with a whole slew of online tests. I decided to take the one sponsored by Psychology Today magazine. Based upon some recent weight gain, an occasional sleepless night, and once in awhile pondering my own mortality, I got a preliminary diagnosis of Major Depressive Disorder. I was advised to seek an appointment with a mental health professional in my area (who'd paid to have his or her name included at the end of the magazine test.)

I immediately became anxious and worried (another scary symptom!) until I realized that Psychology Today couldn't stay in business without selling ads to drug companies with a vested interest in selling megatons of anti-depressive and other psychotropic medications to American citizens, many of whom are probably worried sick about the prospect of President Trump. (Trumpophobia, or Trump Derangement Disorder.)

Ironically, there was a recent  article in Psychology Today warning of the mental health dangers of watching too many drug ads on television:

 The average American TV viewer can expect to watch up to 30 hours of prescription drug advertising each year, the editors of Scientific American noted recently, with drug makers spending $5.2 billion on such ads in 2015. That’s a 60 percent increase on the total spent four years earlier, with no signs of slowing down.

Ironically, the article was accompanied by an ad for mental health screening and (drug) treatment.

Even more ironically, another article in Psychology Today describes how hard, if not impossible, it is to define exactly what mental health even is. 

I'm so confused (one more troubling symptom probably requiring an emergency prescription.)

Does worrying about Trump give you a dry mouth, insomnia or palpitations?

A mental health professional is standing by, prescription pad at the ready. Ka-ching!

If that doesn't appeal to you, listen to any recent speech by President Obama for some nice New-Age therapy. According to him, American life has never been better. All you need are some bootstraps and a dream and a ladder of opportunity to reach the promised land of NotTrump.