Mental health and politicians
When should someone be deemed unfit for public office? Clearly, questions of morals and unprofessional behaviour led to Don Meredith’s resignation from the Canadian Senate. And recently, a disgraceful racial slur caused a York school trustee to step down.
But what about the unpredictable, incendiary and often vulgar actions of U.S. President Donald Trump?
Escalating the situation were two provocatively titled articles in the Washington Post recently.
“When is it OK to say the president might be nuts?” blared one headline on May 2. The president had just finished an angry speech directed mostly at the media, but which also included a bizarre reference to former president Andrew Jackson. Trump seemed to imply that Jackson could have stopped the American Civil War, although Jackson had died 16 years before the war began.
The following day, columnist George Will wrote, “Trump has a dangerous disability” and asked if Trump was uniquely unfit to take the nation into a military conflict. He noted the president has an “untrained mind bereft of information married to stratospheric self-confidence” and further skewered Trump by commenting “that the dangerous thing is that he does not know what it is to know something.”
Americans have seen this movie before. In 1964, Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee, was deemed unfit by 1,000 psychiatrists who had never met with him. Goldwater subsequently launched a $2-million (U.S.) libel suit against a magazine and publisher who printed a story reporting these findings. The Supreme Court awarded Goldwater $1 in compensatory damages and $75,000 in punitive damages.
Subsequently, the American Psychiatric Association, sensing a legal and ethical chill, adopted the Goldwater rule in 1973, preventing psychiatrists from diagnosing someone they have not met.
Yet, in 2016, three professors of psychiatry were not dissuaded from writing to then-president Barack Obama to express “grave concern regarding the mental stability of our president-elect.” They suggested a “full medical and neuropsychiatric evaluation” of Trump’s health be conducted. In February, Scientific American listed 33 other psychiatrists with the same concern, arguing “we fear too much is at stake to be silent any longer.”
However, past evidence and modern values make it wrong to assume that a mental health condition makes someone unfit for public office.
A study by Jonathan David of the Duke University Medical Center reviewed the histories of the first 37 presidents, finding that half of them had been afflicted with mental illness. “The study concluded that 24 per cent met the diagnostic criteria for depression.” Additionally, both anxiety and bipolar disorders were also discovered while 8 per cent of the presidents demonstrated alcohol abuse or dependence.
Very capable politicians who experience mental health issues or addiction challenges are numerous. Abraham Lincoln lived with clinical depression throughout his life. Winston Churchill famously fought “the black dog” of depression. Patrick Kennedy, son of Teddy Kennedy, after serving 16 years in the U.S. House of Representatives, resigned and became a mental health advocate after writing a book about his own struggles with mental health.
North American society is currently engaged in a mega effort to bring mental health and its issues into the open. In 2006, a groundbreaking report, “Out of the Shadows,” by former senator Michael Kirby, sparked the establishment of the Mental Health Commission of Canada. Since then, individuals and corporations have created projects, such as Bell’s Let’s Talk.
The Canadian Mental Health Association estimates 20 per cent of Canadians will personally experience a mental illness in their lifetime, while American statistics peg the number at 18.5 per cent. Of that percentage, some of those individuals have run or will run for office.
A struggle with mental illness must not prevent someone from holding public office. If that was the case, the world may have missed some of its most brilliant leaders in the past and for the future.
Instead, let’s unmask those who seek to destroy and divide. Those who are unethical and immoral. Those who are racist or misogynistic. They are the ones who are not fit for office.
The report “Out of the Shadows,” by former senator Michael Kirby, sparked the establishment of the Mental Health Commission of Canada