By Hal Brown
I thought of writing this after making this comment on an article on RAWSTORY.
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As a retired psychotherapist I look at this through a diagnostic lens. But to paraphrase Dylan “You don't need the psychiatric diagnostic manual to know which way the wind blows.” To varying degrees the "crazy caucus" is composed of people who are seriously in need of mental health intervention. It is eye-popping that the presumably mentally healthy members of Congress like McCarthy don't take this seriously. Are they going to let the inmates totally run the asylum? They may not be able to stop them.
Above is the comment plus the illustration which I put on this article:
Unfortunately the word "crazy" has too many meanings and is used in both positive and negative ways.
The word isn't in the psychiatric dictionary or the diagnostic manual.
Too many people think that even the craziness of someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Herschel Walker are just quirks.
They don't want to delve into an analysis as to whether Greene believes the things she says that would strongly suggest she has a delusional disorder.
They don't want to consider whether Herschel Walker, who may end up in the Senate, still has a dissociative identity disorder.
I wrote about Walker here:
I don't know if Greene was ever in therapy. Walker was and he claimed he was cured with the help of God and by Jerry Mungadze. He believes in exorcism, the occult, and demon possession. I wrote about this here.
It is important not to stigmatize mental illness. Most people with a diagnosed mental illness who are functional enough to make it into public life have disorders like depression and anxiety. Generally they are aware of this because they suffer and frequently seek treatment.
One of the most problematic issues in mental health is that there are some disorders which don't cause people to suffer. These individuals may cause others to suffer but they lack the empathy to care about who they hurt.
The key is to differentiate people who do suffer themselves from those whose reality testing is severely impaired and who cause others to suffer, can't make decisions based on reality, or both.
Walker and Greene are just two examples of people who are now or may be members of Congress who may be diagnosable as having a mental illness which impairs their ability to determine what is real and what isn't. Greene seems to enjoy making people she considers enemies suffer. Walker, or some of his alter personalities, may not remember having made people suffer.
This brings me to the Unhinged Head Honcho, Donald Trump. While he meets every criteria for being a malignant (or sociopathic) narcissist this doesn't mean he can't tell what's real and what isn't. We know he lies but don't know how many of his lies he believes, hence the title and subject of this article:
Trump may end up being tried for one or two crimes (helping plan an insurrection or the documents theft) which could result in a jail sentence where a jury would have to see if his defense is credible. To suggest it would be interesting to see if his defense involved some kind of insanity plea is an understatement.
