Michelle wolf, Sarah huckabee, and the WHCD

[Dill]

(05-03-2018, 01:24 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: If a mental health professional diagnoses someone they have never treated then they are engaging in activity directly opposed to the professional ethics of their profession.    Why would anyone take the opinions of such people seriously, especially as this conduct is being dictated by partisan politics?  You take is seriously because it fits your narrative, you want to believe it, therefore it is acceptable.  A mental health "professional" who diagnoses Charles Manson without  actually treating him is guilty of professional misconduct and I don't anyone but the most deranged partisan hack would put Trump in that category.

All the mental health officials in the book I cited would agree with the bolded statement above.

The question they raise is whether we are now living under extraordinary circumstances, such that it may in fact be unethical NOT to speak out about the correlation between Trump's behavior and the pathologies these experts deal with in their clinical practice.

One can hardly judge whether they are wrong about this, or whether their argument is simply "dictated by partisan politics," without reading their argument. That would certainly be like diagnosing a patient without treating him.  No sense nattering on about how I take their argument seriously because it fits my partosam narrative when not even looking at their argument fits your partisan narrative--and leaves you no basis at all to judge.

People who vote for a president and assess his performance thereafter are not opposing any professional ethics when they make their own judgments about that president's mental fitness. Since 1790 voters have "diagnosed" presidents without treating them. People who read what clinical psychologists and psychiatrists see in Trump's behavior might be greatly aided in that responsible endeavor. People who refuse to read the book are simply diagnosing Trump anyway, just without professional resources.

If there is a debate in the mental health community about whether they should "go public" with what their professional knowledge tells them about Trump, I want to know what the debate is about, what their knowledge tells them.