I'll be at the ocean for the next week. For my mental health I'm taking a vacation from Trump and from my Substack. By Hal M. Brown Plus: How I might have become a Hawaii surfer dude had I taken another path in my life.

I am leaving  for a nine day vacation on the Big Island, Hawaii, early Sunday morning. I will post it before we go. I won't be writing a Substack until I retrn.

Some of my readers may thinkI was hatched fully formed as a monomanical Substacker who writes about politics and often how it relates to psychology. This wasn’t always who I was. There was a juncture in my life where I had I taken another fork in the road I could have ended up as a surfer dude living in Hawaii, catching early waves, and giving lessons to tourists.

I grew up in a residential suburb of New York City in Westchester County. Every summer while all of my well-off friends went to summer camp, we went to Oakland Pool which, being of very modest means (my father was a self-employed upholsterer), what we could afford. It was private pool club in Rye, New York located on Long Island Sound. It had a giant salt water pool (below). You could also swim in Long Island Sound (behind me in the photo above) You had to walk down one of two stairways cut into a sloping concrete wall to reach the water. There was no beach. There was an always crowded public beach next door but we never went there. Next to that beach was a Playland, which was a large amusement park that also had an outdoor pool and a beach. We went to playland a couple of times each summer for the rides.

They had fireworks which were fired above the water Friday nights so on the few times when we stayed late enough we could watch them. Playland is still in operation (see website)

When I was 15 I was lucky enough to spend the entire summer in Honolulu with my Aunt Grace who had moved there when I was 13.

Above is her photo. You can barely make out the ocean in the background.

She had lived with us all my life but took the daring step of moving there without a job after a bad breakup with a boyfriend. It wasn't even a state yet. When she was younger she had a pilot license and during the war helped ferry military aircraft around the country and then worked as an air traffic controller and sold costume jewelry in some kind of enterprise I never understood.

In Hawaii she had some unusual jobs including drive a jeep that picked up the balls at a golf driving range and typing book manuscripts. She typed at least one for James Michener. She finally got a regular job at the public library which she kept until she retired.

She was a fantastic distance swimmer. In fact if you do a deep dive (no pun intended) looking for her online you will discover this NOAA article. It is about a sea turtle breeding area she discovered. It was named “Grace’s Ledge” in her honor. She’s on the bottom of page 12.

I’d never flown on an airplane when I went there. It was a long flight on a propeller DC6-B plane. I sat near the wing and was alarmed when I saw flames cming out of the back of an engine. “Nothing to worry about, it’s just backfiring” I was reassured.

As we were approaching Oahu I took a photo of Diamond Head and didn’t realize at the time that I’d taken a picture of my aunt’s house (arrow below) and other spots I would come to know well.

I learned to surf. I wasn’t at all homesick. Had my life gone a different way I could have ended up living there. 

Living in a one room apartment with my aunt wasn’t ideal, but it was doable. She had a few annoying quirks but she didn’t really drive me crazy. She was, to be colloquial, really a great lady and unlike anyone. Like my mother, her sister, she was kind and empathetic.

I made a few friends over the summer. I can easily see me having decided to stay there. Honolulu wasn’t nearly the tourist mecca that it has become. Here’s what Waikikki Beach looked like when I was there when there were only a few hotels:

The Outrigger Canoe Club is in the foreground and the Royal Hawaiian Hotel behind it. I had a kinda-not-really girlfriend named Star. B eing a shy 15 perhaps had I been a bit older that would have developed into a romance and it might have been what kept me there.

Living an entire summer in Hawaii, long enough to be really tan and have my feet so calloused I could walk anywhere barefoot, I felt that I almost fit it in. In the picture below I’m in a World War Two observation bunker on a beach not far from where we lived on the other side of Diamond Head.

This was the view from our apartment:

There was a condo across from our apartment but fortunately it didn’t block our vew of Diamond Head. 

This is what it looks like today (from their website here)

A neighbor friend and I used to walk to the top of it on weekends going up the no-railing stairs when construction workers weren’t there.

I took these photos of our place and of my aunt in her yard from there.

My aunt had a great Studebaker convertibe. If I’d been old enough to drive I strongly suspect I’d have stayed there. (The station wagon belonged to the people who own the attached house.)

Below is me on Waikikki Beach:

Here I am on the steps to my aunt’s one room over the garage apartment at the base of Diamond Head. Since then the house was torn down and replaced. It was on the corner of the main Waikakki Beach drag, Kalākaua Avenue where it ends at Coconut Street. This is what I looks like today:

I heard from my aunt after she moved to a care facility that James McArthur, who played Danno in Hawaii Five-O, lived there.

Above: That’s me on the stairs to my aunt’s apartment.

I was a fairly good surfer on waves as tall as I was, but you’ll have to take my word for it since I don’t have any photos. I could never hang ten, but I could catch waves from first break quite a distance from shore and ride them until they no longer were breaking.

I had a surfboard locker at Waikikki Beach and usually surfed several times a week.

 Sometimes I brought it home to surf in the ocean just a few steps from our place. This was somewhat dangerous because the waves broke over a reef which was less than a foot under the surface. Wiping out (how about that surfer term?) over the reef, called a reef break, could have caused a serious injury.

All the photos of me on a board which I have are the ones below. My aunt took them from a seawall near her place. They show me trying unsuccessfully to stand up. You have to take my word for it that I actually could ride a wave. In fact early one morning when hardly anybody was on the beach or surfing the movie star David Niven was trying to surf with another man. They were not far from me and were watching me to see how I managed to catch waves. He’d starred in the Best Picture Academy Award winning “Around the World in 80 Days” three years before and was a mega-star. By coincidence, Aunt Grace took my sister and me to see the movie in New York City on the huge screen when it opened. Now I wish I’d paddled over to talk to him.

I’ve always loved the ocean. 

One of the worst things about living in mid-Michigan, where I went to attend Michigan State and stayed for 20 years, was that the nearest big body of water was Lake Michigan and even that was a long drive. When we moved to Massachusetts, a lovely beach on Buzzards Bay was nearby. There were no waves to enjoy, which I would have liked, but the water was warm enough to swim in.

Off season, when it wasn’t crowded, we’d sometimes go to Cape Cod where the beaches with their dunes are beautiful, but the water was too cold to for me to go in and enjoy the waves, though some people did.

Below: Cape Cod beach in winter:

Moving to Oregon, the Pacific was also a long drive, 90 minutes on winding roads. The water there is way too cold to swim in.

Today we are leaving for an oceanside vacation on the Kona Coast of Hawaii (the Big Island).

As I write this on Saturday, I am seriously leaving my laptop at home. That way if I even want to write a Substack I won’t be able to. Of course, I can read and send emails on my iPhone and also look at the internet.

I know it is is psychologically the best if I just enjoyed the ocean and being with family and, plain and simple, getting the fear and loathing out of my head for nine or so days.

As I wrote yesterday, having the Secret Service investigate me won’t get the media attention Kathy Griffin got when she posted the image of the decapitated Trump head, but it could lead to more people reading this Substack.

If you don’t see a new Substack for awhile you can assume that either I succeeded in taking my mental health break or was arrested by federal agents for posting what I did (here) yesterday….. or both.

As I sit here at 3:00 AM (we call for an Uber to the airport at 5:15 but I couldn't sleep) I'm about to jolt my brain awake with my first gulp of morning coffee, I ask myself “how bad will things have gotten when I return to writing my Substack?”

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If Trump believes some of his pronouncements he may be clinically delusional

 If Trump believes some of his pronouncements he may be clinically delusional

By Hal Brown, MSW

 

I am tired of writing about Trump's psychopathology. Today's HUFFPOST story "Trump Says Biden 'Convinced' Putin To Bomb Ukraine In Mar-a-Lago Campaign Speech" prompts me to write yet another blog story about the question as to just how mentally ill the beleaguered former president might have become. 

We know he's a malignant narcissist, but how can we tell whether he is veering into becoming a delusional psychotic? 

In half of my 40 year career as a psychotherapist I worked in a community mental health center. Most of the severely mentally ill patients I worked with had been stabilized on medication so I only had a few chances to see someone exhibiting the delusions that were manifest prior to being stabilized on medications. Those times I did see patients who weren't medicated their delusions were the more typical. Several patients off medication had religious delusions and another believed a movie star was in love with him to the extent he ended up at the airport trying to board a plane without a ticket to be with his lover in Hollywood.

When a clinician does a diagnostic assessment they evaluate the patient's rational thinking and reality testing. A simple mental status exam includes the following (reference):

• Thought process
  The flow and coherence of thoughts, inferred from a client’s observable behaviors, especially speech. For example, if the client’s speech is rambling and disorganized, the examiner may infer that their thinking is also disorganized.
• Thought content
  Thought content can be inferred from spontaneous speech and direct questioning by the examiner. For example, the examiner might ask, “Have you ever heard things other people don’t hear or seen things other people don’t see?” An answer of “yes” to such questions raises the possibility of hallucinatory thought content.
• Insight
  How aware is the client of their own strengths and limitations?
• Strengths and limitations
  Traditional forms of the MSE have been designed to record any cognitive, emotional, or behavioral deficits. Consider how a clinician would fill out portions of a standard mental status form like this, in particular the parts below, for Trump:

Here's more 

Delusional disorder, previously called paranoid disorder, is a type of serious mental illness called a psychotic disorder. People who have it can’t tell what’s real from what is imagined.

Delusions are the main symptom of delusional disorder. They’re unshakable beliefs in something that isn’t true or based on reality. But that doesn’t mean they’re completely unrealistic. Delusional disorder involves delusions that aren’t bizarre, having to do with situations that could happen in real life, like being followed, poisoned, deceived, conspired against, or loved from a distance. These delusions usually involve mistaken perceptions or experiences. But in reality, the situations are either not true at all or highly exaggerated. From WebMd

Perhaps Trump is already so detached from reality that any mental health professional would diagnosis him as having a psychosis. There's no way to tell how much of his pronouncements are performances and what he really believes.

Anybody who truly cares about his well-being ought to be very concerned about his lapsing into a psychotic state. Consider what you would do if you had a loved one who was expressing some of the beliefs Trump has been expressing.

Those who consider him the leader of the GOP, those cult members who blindly follow him, should also ask themselves whether they are being led by someone who is so unmoored from reality that they may be clinically delusional.

Another question which researchers could well look into is whether someone who deliberately uses gaslighting (defined as manipulating someone so as to make them question their own reality) for their own purposes can eventually gaslight themselves.

Marjorie Taylor Greene as an example of a low information and gullible person as opposed to being delusional

Just yesterday Rep. Greene addressed her pervious belief in QAnon conspiracy theories:

Wanting to believe something is different than actually believing it. Consider the poster on the wall of the X Files' Fox Mulder's office:

If someone doesn't have the ability to apply logical thinking to beliefs like those promulgated by QAnon ( including that the Clintons were responsible for murders, that the Democratic Party was responsible for a satanic child sex trafficking ring and that the California wildfires were caused by space lasers owned by a Jewish family) and gets all their information from one-sided sources they are vulnerable to being manipulated. Nobody wants to admit they were gullible and, as MTG said, that they were "sucked into" believing something that any logical person wouldn't believe.

This doesn't mean they are clinically delusional. It may suggest that they have a low IQ but above average intelligence isn't a requirement for holding public office. 

If anyone running for a major political office had to have above a 120 IQ and pass a battery of psychological tests I venture to suggest that the GOP side of the House would look very different. To the delight of Democrats, the GOP itself wouldn't be having to deal with this guy:

Update:

 

Ben Kalom replied on this site...

Thanks for blending in criteria. This helps secure our assertions that he is not mentally fit to hold any public office.

Mentally fit - I do not believe it matters whether genetics, experiences, trauma, parenting or personal choices have led us to this place of a fellow who simply blathers about in social media. He has no ability to filter. Delusional disorders is the correct section of DSM 5-TR to be reading and giving consideration. That section, in addition to considering his personality disorder cluster, should be the hub of any diagnostic conversation wheel we use to chat about how best to manage our feelings about him, vis-a-vis his repeated insistence on being vocal on social media.

There is a misperception of who might be considered "mentally ill." What I am referring to is the first defense he threw out to his crowd, "I'm rich!" Is there something about being wealthy that magically inoculates a person against mental disorder? I would offer the converse argument. Mo' money, mo' crazy. You need sage and sound counsel to help you manage your false-bottomed sense of total safety and security while living on this planet.

Donald simply does not know when to shut the f#$k up.

I am reminded of a training video in which Dr. Sal Minuchin was interviewing a patient with disorganized thinking. To characterize just how disturbing it is to the treatment professional to work with these folks day after day, Sal could not restrain himself and uttered, "What are you talking about??" in a most directive manner, hoping to encourage the client to get back on track.

In delusional disorder, there's no thesis, no theme, no specific argument, no path that gets to anywhere. It is walking with a person who is lost in the forest and then finds yet another distraction. Being lost is the entire point of their delusion. It is how they guard against the reality of life. Life breaks through their ordinary protections with ordinariness.

THat's much, much more than they can handle.

The warning we who study the disordered persons and the qualitative/quantitative means by which they've gotten into the swamp they are in, need to heed is in the sheer number of people who are also in that swamp with him, and who came to that swamp, expecting to find a country club swimming pool. His ability to hold them in a promise of prosperity has increased whatever disordered thinking and feeling these folks experienced prior to believing his siren song.

Crazy draws more crazy to itself. There's kinship in delusional status.

Is Donald delusional? I think I agree with that assertion, and I encourage other helpers and human services workers and professionals to see the dead poseys in the hands of their clients, and although you want to be kind and offer unconditional positive regard, keep the truth in your head that no matter what else you hear, those flowers are dead.

Donald is holding out dead flowers to his followers. That's what he's selling them. Dead flowers, purporting to re-animate them and make them alive again...

If you are a realist like I am, then you see how difficult it will be to convince folks who drank his dead flower tea to walk away from believing the delusional reality they've walked through the looking glass and entered.

Below from Tibel:

Click above to enlarge