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By Hal Brown, MSW, Retired psychotherapist
I’m glad that John Boehner, is making the news with his colorful language attacking fellow Republicans but that he said about Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff from 2020 to 2021, on Morning Joe this morning struck me as unacceptable. You can watch the segment here.
Here’s the portion I object to:
"So Meadows comes in and he looks a little nervous and he's sitting on this low couch across from this chair I used to sit in and before i could really say much, he slid off of the couch, onto his knees and put his hands in a prayer position and looked at me and said, 'Mr. Speaker, would you forgive me?" and I said 'for what?' I forgot all about the fact that he had voted against me."
"After the 2014 election, he voted against me again to be speaker and then two months later, wrote me this glowing letter. Listen, he's a nice man, but a bit schizophrenic.”
Boehner was a Republican member of the House of Representatives from 1991 to 2015. From 2015 he was Speaker of the House until resigned from the House of Representatives in October 2015 due to opposition from within the Republican caucus. Wikipedia
He’s been promoting his new audio book “On The House: A Washington Memoir” and made the news recently when a tape was made public of him going off script as saying “Oh, and Ted Cruz, go fuck yourself.”
Axios says it was a “rogue moment” and other articles said he “went off script” when he said it but it certainly got him a lot of publicity. Here’s a DuckDuckGo search for what he said about Ted Cruz:
Whether this was a spontaneous unplanned remark or not it was worth who knows how many additional sales for his audio book. It may have led to his appearance on “Morning Joe” this morning which led to him suggesting Mark Meadows was possibly suffering from schizophrenia. This remark will definitely not make the news the way his tell Ted Cruz to fuck himself did which was fine to me whether said on purpose or off-the-cuff.
What isn’t fine with me was his using a clinical term in a colloquial way. It should go without saying that schizophrenia is a serious mental disorder which causes a great deal of suffering for those who have it and for their families and friends.
Unlike the two personality disorders which I and many other clinicians have suggested Donald Trump can be diagnosed as having, narcissistic personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder, instead of personally suffering themselves those with one or both of these disorders cause other people to suffer and don’t feel the ill effects themselves.
Many people with schizophrenia, who more often than not know their own diagnosis, follow political news just the way we do. It wouldn’t surprise me that some of them would object to being compared to Trump sycophant and apologist Mark Meadows.
While the percentage of people with schizophrenia has remained stable in the United States at 0.33 — 0.34 percent since 1990, at about 1.5 million, (Reference) the public generally hears the term and conflates it with all of the most serious psychiatric disorders such as bipolar disorder.
The National Institute of Mental Health breaks down their statistics into Any Mental Disorder (AMD) and Serious Mental Disorder (SMD). (Reference) These are the most recent numbers for SMI’s. Note that there are pre-pandemic:
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- In 2019, there were an estimated 13.1 million adults aged 18 or older in the United States with SMI. This number represented 5.2% of all U.S. adults.
- The prevalence of SMI was higher among females (6.5%) than males (3.9%).
- Young adults aged 18-25 years had the highest prevalence of SMI (8.6%) compared to adults aged 26-49 years (6.8%) and aged 50 and older (2.9%).
- The prevalence of SMI was highest among the adults reporting two or more races (9.3%), followed by AI/AN adults (6.7%). The prevalence of SMI was lowest among NH/OPI adults (2.6% )
So, John Boehner, please don’t throw out the term “schizophrenic” so casually. It only has one meaning.
ADDENDUM
What about describing Trump as a malignant narcissist? Does this stigmatize all people suffering from a mental illness?
The brief answer is that it doesn’t. Those like John Gartner, PhD, the founder of Duty to Warn (see “Donald Trump's malignant narcissism is toxic: Psychologist — Mental health professionals have a 'duty to warn' about a leader who may be unfit to serve.”, and I who have publicly explained why Trump meets the criteria for making this assessment have explained that malignant narcissists with power are dangerous and not only don’t they personally suffer, they make others suffer. Those psychotherapists in the Duty to Warn movement have considered that it was an obligation to explain why Trump’s psychopathology made him dangerous.
References
For brevity I am putting a only a link to a relevant 2013 article from SLATE here:
