I’m not a professional; it would be irresponsible of me to publicly guess which illness(es) Trump suffers from. And besides, that’s not my point. Rather, it’s that people who don’t have training in or substantial experience with serious mental illness can often be quite naive about it. And we, as a society, have been extremely naive about Donald Trump.
Without a clear understanding of mental illness, or often even recognition of it, people typically make an enormous mistake: they think that someone suffering from serious mental illness can, like the rest of us, simply learn to “behave better.” That you can explain to them what they’ve done wrong, and they’ll learn and adjust. Or that if problems continue, you can successfully use a system of rewards and punishments to reinforce better behavior, like you would with a dog or a child. And if they don’t adjust, they’re just being stubborn, or they’re “bad apple.”
But that’s not how it works. And not because mental illness is so different from other illness, but because it’s so similar in certain ways. As with any serious illness, band aids and pep talks accomplish next to nothing. Serious mental illness requires serious mental health care treatment, which may include medication.
Seriously ill people can’t simply be encouraged or shamed into being better. Why? Because the illness greatly reduces their agency: their ability to think rationally and to act of their own free will. Serious mental illness often hampers the capacity think rationally and drives behavior. Thus, your well reasoned explanations about why such-and-such is bad behavior and why it needs to stop, will never be enough to help a seriously mentally ill person permanently correct their behavior. At best it will lead to some short term improvements before the cycle resumes anew.
So, for example, you will never be able to successfully explain to Donald Trump why, amid international protests spurred by the racist murder of George Floyd, how tone deaf, insensitive, and even bizzare it is to say of a new national jobs report:
“Hopefully George is looking down right now and saying this is a great thing that’s happening for our country. It’s a great day for him. It’s a great day for everybody. This is a great day for everybody. This is a great, great day in terms of equality. It’s really what our Constitution requires, and it’s what our country is all about.”
My point is in no way to shame people who suffer from mental illness, just like I’m not shaming anyone who suffers from physical illness. Rather, if anyone should be ashamed, it’s the rest of us who expect people with untreated mental illness to behave as if they don’t. It’s as ludicrous as telling with someone with advanced tuberculosis that they just need to take deeper breaths.
And this ignorance, these unreasonable expectations, are at the core of every politician, every advisor, and every pundit who, over the last four years, ever thought Donald Trump could be “trained” or “taught,” to be presidential; that he would eventually “grow into the job,”or if not, that he could be “managed,” or at least be “contained.”
This was always a profoundly naive sentiment, wishful thinking based on an erroneous assessment of him and a deep misunderstanding of his mental health. That this naivete has been so pervasive, reveals our society’s deep misunderstanding and even basic awareness of mental health. And of course it has been disastrous for our nation, enabling a man who suffers from untreated serious mental illness to hold the world’s most powerful office.