Category: Mental Illness

NO SYNDROME ABOUT IT: TRUMP IS A REAL IMPOSTER

Ever since Donald Trump descended that golden escalator in pursuit of the presidency, he has been diagnosed by detractors (here, here and here) with having a severe case of Imposter Syndrome. Nothing could be further from the truth.  

Millions of intelligent, high-achieving adults are plagued with Imposter Syndrome, the false notion that they have faked their way into the limelight and don’t deserve the success they have achieved.  Can you imagine the Donald doubting his success?  This is a guy who spins utter failure into faux success, all the while basking in the illusion that whatever he touches turns to gold, a modern day, orange-tinged Rumpelstiltskin with bad hair.  

Imposter Syndrome emerged in the 1970s through the work of two psychologists, Suzanna Imes and Pauline Rose Clance. It was initially seen as a severe insecurity affliction in mostly high-achieving women, notably in a culture unwelcoming to female achievement. Years later, however, researchers found that men were also prone to the condition. According to the International Journal of Behavioral Science, 70 percent of people experience the syndrome at some point in their lives. It has been described variously as an inability to internalize your own successes, and a “pervasive feeling of self-doubt, insecurity, or fraudulence despite often overwhelming evidence to the contrary.” 

That assuredly is not Donald Trump, a man whose toxicity could be significantly reduced through daily injections of self-doubt.  His only relationship to this disorder is that he has undoubtedly validated the distorted feelings of insecurity among those actually suffering from the syndrome. After all, if a genuine, real-deal imposter like Trump can masquerade his way into the West Wing through the hocus-pocus of smoke and mirrors, then how real can anyone’s achievement be?

How, you may ask, could anyone fake their way into the White House?  The same way you get to Carnegie Hall:  practice, practice, practice.  Trump has spent a lifetime perfecting the art of being someone he is not. 

For example:

ORIGINAL FAKE NEWS. It is well established that, as far back as the 1970s, Trump routinely called major news outlets under a variety of fictitious names, claiming to work for the mogul.  In exchange for anonymity, he then concocted brazenly false, boastful  stories about the Donald and his projects.

SELF-MADE BILLIONAIRE MYTH. Trump’s life-defining narrative of having built his empire all on his own, with barely any help from his family was totally decimated by a detailed New York Times investigation showing that the president started his company with at least “$413 million from his father’s real estate empire, much of it through tax dodges in the 1990s.”

PHONY CAMPAIGN FOR THE RICH LIST.  Using a pseudonym to impersonate a source inside his company, Trump repeatedly badgered Forbes Magazine with fabricated numbers to get himself high placement on its annual listing of the 400 richest people.  Jonathan Greenberg, the Forbes reporter who took the calls, told the Washington Post he later learned that Trump should not have been on many of those lists. He said he placed him on an early list, for example, on the net worth of $100 million, only to later learn that his actual worth was $5 million.

As president, Donald Trump has consistently played the role of Imposter in Chief.  He said his New York-born father emmigrated from Germany. He insisted he had a “wonderful” healthcare plan as a replacement for Obamacare. There was no plan.  Mexico would pay for the wall, until it didn’t. Then he’d force Congress to fund the wall, until it didn’t.  Now he boasts that part of the wall has actually been built, and then declares the phoniest of emergencies in order to “finish” that which never began. 

This is the direct opposite of Imposter Syndrome behavior.  Rather than performing at a highly competent level but being unable to own his success, Trump has no idea what he is doing but is blinded to his insecurity through an inability to grasp his ineptness .  There is actually a name for this phenomenon: the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Back in 1999, Cornell University psychologist David Dunning and his student researcher, Justin Kruger, wrote an article for the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Its title foreshadowed the Trump presidency:  “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments”.  

Dunning and Kruger found, according to reporting on their work, that there is “a cognitive basis in which the less able people are, the more likely they are to overestimate their abilities.”  Although their work was well respected in academic circles, the Dunning-Kruger Effect went mainstream with Trump’s election.  Dunning wrote a piece for Politico in 2017 in which he said that not only was Trump a manifestation of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, but that his base is “grounded in similar ignorance.”  Wrote Dunning: “. . .they do not know enough to hold him accountable for the serious gaffes he makes. They fail to recognize those gaffes as missteps.”

And so it is that our Dunning-Kruger president stumbles his way through governance. He dismisses global warming on a cold day, calls real news “fake news”, believes Vladimir Putin over his own intelligence experts, and boasts of his peacemaking in North Korea while that regime continues to manufacture nuclear weapons. Not knowing what he doesn’t know pulls him and this country further and further into the abyss.

Decades before academicians framed the duality of the Imposter Syndrome and the Dunning-Kruger Effect, philosopher Bertrand Russell perfectly captured the dynamic in a 1933 essay titled “The Triumph of Stupidity”.  He wrote: “The fundamental cause of the trouble is that . . . the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.”

Still, given a choice between the two, always go with doubt.  Used constructively, it can build a path to wisdom.

SEARCHING FOR DUE PROCESS AT THE ALTAR OF GUN WORSHIP

In an odd rhetorical twist, our latest national conversation on guns has embraced an unlikely term: due process. After all, guns are the antithesis of due process. They kill instantly and indiscriminately, not on accepted rules of justice, but on the capricious basis of a sight line. Yet, some of the suggestions aimed at reversing the growing phenomena of mass shootings raise critical due process concerns – on both sides of the gun control divide.

Take poor Donald Trump, for example. In a rare and short-lived moment of sensibility, he suggested that we might want to think about relieving dangerous people of their guns before giving them due process. His acolytes at the NRA and Fox News went apoplectic. To them, the president sounded very much like Lewis Carroll’s Queen of Hearts in the infamous case of a tart-stealing Knave. So eager was her Highness to have the suspect beheaded, she called for a reordering of jurisprudence: “First the sentence, then the verdict.”

In fairness, that’s not exactly what Trump had in mind last week when he opined that, in the case of deeply disturbed people, we should “take the guns first, (and) go through due process second.” The concept seems eminently reasonable. If the issue before the court is whether a gun owner is a raving lunatic filled with homicidal rage, you don’t want him fiddling with his AR-15 semi-automatic on the witness stand while a judge determines if he is dangerous. Yet the reaction from the well-armed right was predictable. They have long been programmed to go into immediate convulsions upon hearing the words “take the guns”. This crowd’s favorite slogan has long been: “I’ll give you my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.” They don’t take kindly to talk of gun taking.

The concept of due process has been around a lot longer than guns and dates back to early English common law. It was codified in the Magna Carta in 1215, and our founders later did a cut-and-paste, inserting those words into both the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution. Although the nitty-gritty of what constitutes due process is an ongoing judicial work in progress, the basic notion is that government can’t take people’s life, liberty or property without going through a fair and just judicial process.

To the NRA, the only due process that should ever separate a guy and his gun is an involuntary commitment to a mental institution or an adjudication of being a “mental defective”. That standard would have kept 97 percent of recent mass shooters legally armed and ready to fire. The well-heeled gun lobby claims to have pulled Trump back from his momentary lucidity that gave rise to the concept of take-the-guns-first-and then-have-a-hearing. Fox News labeled the idea as “un-American as imaginable”.

Quite the contrary, Trump’s suggestion was deeply seeped in American due process tradition. For example, police can detain suspects on the “reasonable suspicion” that they committed a crime. They then go before a judge within a reasonable time period and the state must show “probable cause” to hold them for trial. Finally, in order to trigger a prison sentence, the state needs a conviction that comes only by proof beyond a reasonable doubt. That’s the same sequential approach Trump was talking about before he was reined in by his NRA handlers. There was ample evidence that the 19-year-old man charged in the recent Florida shooting was deeply distressed, armed with assault rifles and threatening to shoot up a school. Those facts should have been sufficient to temporarily confiscate his guns, pending a due process hearing on the question of his dangerousness.

In fact, that is precisely what happens right now in five states – California, Connecticut, Indiana, Washington and Oregon – that have adopted so-called “red-flag” laws. Based on evidence from friends, family or police of a credible threat, a judge can order the temporary confiscation of a person’s guns, pending a future hearing on the issue. Studies have shown that those laws have resulted in a significant reduction in gun homicides and suicides.

Trump came up with another brain storm on the gun issue last week, and this one would blow the entire concept of due process to smithereens. Waxing nostalgic about nineteenth century insane asylums, the president suggested this might be a way to lock up potential shooters when there is no evidence to support apprehension. “You know,” said Trump, “in the old days we had mental institutions. We had a lot of them. And you could nab somebody like this (the Florida shooter), because they knew something was off. (Then) he’s off the streets.”

Trump’s memory of the days when you could “nab” undesirables and toss them into the loony bin represents one of the more inglorious chapters of this country’s history. Based on a belief that mental illness could be dealt with only by locking people up, hundreds of thousands of Americans were confined to these draconian dungeons with little or no due process, many because they just seemed to be different. Once locked up, they were constantly sedated and, in many cases, surgically lobotomized. Prodded largely by rapid advances in mental health treatment, the Supreme Court ruled in 1975, that people could be involuntarily committed to mental hospitals only upon proving to a judge that they are a danger to themselves or others.

Even if the law changed, it’s hard to imagine building enough insane asylums to house all of the angry, socially awkward young men who have guns and talk about killing people. Recent reports indicate that the internet is filled with hundreds of group chats involving thousands of mostly young males who venerate school shooters and fantasize about joining their ranks. While carting them all off to a mental hospital and sedating them until their fiftieth birthday might reduce mass shootings, it totally destroys any semblance of due process.

There is a better solution: take their guns. After all, those students they are yammering about killing are also entitled to due process. Maybe one day, when the Congress and the White House are no longer owned by the NRA, we can finally get around to protecting that right to life, free from weekly mass shootings.

MENTAL ILLNESS IS DRIVING OUR GUN CULTURE

Donald Trump is right: Our country’s epidemic of gun violence is, first and foremost, a mental health problem. The president and his Republican sycophants are nuts. They are in an ideologically-induced fugue state, so far removed from reality that sacrificing the lives of children is but a mere normal and necessary function of gun idolatry.

The nation’s latest fuselage of assault rifle bullets had just terrorized a Parkland, Florida school, leaving 17 dead. As the bodies were being cleared from the locker-laced hallways of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the NRA’s hypnotized Republican automatons were right on script. The word “gun” stricken from their vocabulary, suddenly the party of just-say-no to health care couldn’t stop talking about the need to treat mental illness.

“So many signs that the Florida shooter was mentally disturbed,” said Trump.

“This individual appears to have significant issues with mental illness,” said Senator Ted Cruz.

Florida’s Republican Gov. Rick Scott talked about the need to care for the “mentally ill”.

Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar II promised that the administration will be “laser-focused on getting Americans with mental illness the help they need.”

Gentlemen, heal yourselves!

The real insanity facing this country is the lethal delusion of elected leaders that we can go right on making guns more accessible than drinking water without, on a daily basis, having to bury school children, concert-goers and other innocents. The Florida massacre was the 30th mass shooting in a year not even two months old. There were 345 such shootings in 2017. While many countries have a mental illness rate far in excess of that for the United States, no other nation comes close to us in terms of the number of guns or mass shootings.

“Insanity,” goes the old quote of disputed origin, “is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” In this case, It’s a cliché that speaks truth to power. Republicans mourn and grieve over the victims of the latest shooting spree, mumble their mantra about not blaming the guns, and keep doing nothing to restrict their availability. And then wait a day or so for the next mass killing, rinse and repeat. Think that’s insane? It’s just the tip of the GOP’s mental disturbance iceberg when it comes to this issue.

For example:

MISSOURI state Rep. Mike Leara introduced a bill last month that would make it a felony for any of his fellow lawmakers to propose legislation that would restrict an individual’s right to buy, carry and shoot guns.

FEDERAL law prohibits the sale of a handgun to people under 21, but it allows 18-year-olds – like the Parkland shooter – to buy semiautomatic assault rifles.

VIRGINIA Republican legislators recently killed a bill that would have required a minor to get parental permission before keeping guns in their home. They also buried a measure that would have required licensed child-care facilities to keep guns locked up while children were being cared for.

FLORIDA passed a law, later struck down in federal court, prohibiting physicians from talking to their patients about guns.

GEORGIA is home to numerous local ordinances requiring every home to be armed with at least one gun.

MONTANA voters approved a referendum giving local police authority to arrest any FBI agent who attempted to enforce one of the few meager federal gun regulations.

SOUTH DAKOTA allows all teachers, Kindergarten through grad school, to carry loaded guns in the classroom.

This is the real story of mental health and guns. Somewhere along the way, sanity was totally eliminated from what once was a healthy give-and-take on gun issues. Assault rifles have become more sacred than the lives of our children. It doesn’t get much crazier than that. The president’s sudden interest in reducing gun violence through mental health and school safety initiatives is a sad, cynical, transparent deflection from dealing with the only public policy issue that matters here: gun control. Just a year ago, Trump signed a bill that repealed an Obama era initiative that made it more difficult for people receiving Social Security disability for serious mental illness to buy guns. As he told the NRA last fall, “You came through for me, and I am going to come through for you.”

Two days before the Florida shooting, Trump submitted a budget request to Congress that called for a $25 million reduction in funds for national school safety programs, and for elimination of a $400 million grant program designed to help schools prevent bullying or provide mental health assistance.

The president routinely decries our “open borders” as a source of the “. . .loss of many innocent lives.” “This American carnage,” he said at his inauguration, “stops right here and stops right now.” Of course, it didn’t. Murders committed by illegal immigrants are a drop in the bucket compared to those carried out by American white men using semiautomatic assault weapons. The president doesn’t lift a finger to stop that kind of carnage. That’s not what coming through for the NRA is all about.

The noxious absolutism of Second Amendment gun worship is pathologically insane. Our Bill of Rights is a masterful document, but unlike Moses’ Commandments, the protections are not absolute. Speech is free, as they say, but you can’t yell “fire” in a crowded theater. Why should the right to bear arms mean carte blanche access to rapid-fire military assault weapons? As every other industrialized country has recognized, there is a need to balance the rights of gun enthusiasts with legitimate concerns for public safety. A society that puts a gun collector’s right to stockpile AR-15 rifles above the lives of school children is, well, mentally ill.