Mental health professionals said Goldwater Rule be damned, it shouldn't apply to us when we warn about the danger of Donald Trump.
Vindication came today with this news not only for Dr. John D. Gartner, founder of Duty to Warn (See "Experts are desperate to warn the public": Hundreds sign Dr. John Gartner's Trump dementia petition"), all the contributors to the best selling "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump" and the hundreds of mental health professionals like myself who went public despite The Goldwater Rule. We wrote explaining why Trump was suffering from one or more psychiatric disorders that made him both unfit and dangerous to hold the office of president.
Many mainstream media articles about our doing this referenced The Goldwater Rule and suggested we were violating it. Each time this was included in an article it probably instilled doubt in some readers about the credibilty of our argument.
This was published in HUFFPOST today:
A psychiatrist who helped craft the 1973 “Goldwater rule” that has kept many mental health professionals from opining on Donald Trump for nearly a decade said that it was not intended as a hard-and-fast prohibition, and that if he were Trump’s doctor, he would order a full battery of tests to determine the cause of what he believes could be the former president’s dementia.
“He seems to be progressively cognitively impaired,” said Allen Dyer, a retired George Washington University psychiatry professor.
Dyer said Trump’s recent behavior warrants medical evaluation, like his apparent inability to remain focused on a single topic or string together complete sentences, for example, or his confusing of people, as he has repeatedly done with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. And more recently, his loss of interest in taking questions at his own campaign event, followed by a demand that his staff play some of his favorite songs while he stood onstage and swayed to the music.
“I find it concerning that he doesn’t complete his sentences, seems to lose track of the question he is trying to answer, or avoid, and that one thought doesn’t lead to another, but appears to veer tangentially off track,” Dyer said.
The article goes on to explain why the American Psychiatric Association formulated this rule.
This is how Wikipedia decribes The Goldwarer Rule:
The Goldwater rule is Section 7 in the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) Principles of Medical Ethics,[1] which states that psychiatrists have a responsibility to participate in activities contributing to the improvement of the community and the betterment of public health, but when asked to comment on public figures, they shall refrain from diagnosing, which requires a personal examination and consent.[2] It is named after former U.S. Senator and 1964 Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater.[3][4]
Creation
The issue arose in 1964 when Fact magazine published "The Unconscious of a Conservative: A Special Issue on the Mind of Barry Goldwater,"[3][5][6] a play on the title of Goldwater's bestseller The Conscience of a Conservative. The magazine polled psychiatrists about Goldwater and whether he was fit to be president.[7][8] Goldwater sued magazine editor Ralph Ginzburg and managing editor Warren Boroson, and in Goldwater v. Ginzburg (July 1969) received compensation of $75,000 ($623,000 today).
Now, with two weeks until the election, it is too much to hope for that undecided voters who think Trump is as stable as the Rock of Gilbralter will reconsider this conclusion and realize that all the mental health experts are right about him.
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