What are the psychological underpinnings of our current political era? Why have we allowed democracy to recede, emotion to rise, and authoritarian leaders divide and control us with help from the media?

And what needs to happen for the tide to reverse?

Join me and my guest, psychiatrist Allen Dyer, MD, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health at the George Washington University School of Medicine in Washington, DC, as we walk through his latest book, Madness and the Political Divide, published by Routledge.

I have known Dr. Dyer for over a decade, as we shared overlapping circles when I was a mental health policy reporter and he was still teaching at GWU. I interviewed Dr. Dyer in 2019 to reflect on the first Trump campaign that sparked a divide among mental health professionals, particularly psychiatrists, some of whom thought it was their duty to warn against what they claimed to be Trump’s destructive narcissism, and those who warned against diagnosing candidates without actually taking a clinical history. The debate was centered on what came to be called The Goldwater Rule, which Dr. Dyer helped to write in 1973, when he was a member of the Ethics Committee at the American Psychiatric Association.

The Goldwater Rule was in response to how psychiatrists attributed all sorts of neurosis and serious mental illnesses to former presidential candidate, Republican Barry Goldwater, who had run for office a decade before the rule was devised.

I really enjoyed re-listening to the first interview (linked below) with Dr. Dyer. It was a good conversation to take the pulse of how the mental health of our leaders is debated by the professionals. I found listening to the two together was instructive: like reading a personal journal then and now, only it’s the journal charting the changes in America’s relationship to Trump, and our acceptance of authoritarianism.

In the previous interview recorded in 2019, I was certainly less hyped up, lol. This time around, I was running down a mugshot and about to tear off to the arraignment of a defendant in a double homicide in Lexington, an hour away. I must have had too much coffee, too.

Here’s our interview from 10 years ago:

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When I was ten years old I somehow ended up in a summer camp for creative writing held at Magsig Middle School in Centerville, Ohio. My mother probably signed me up in order to avoid having me around while school was out, although, I remember the sense of caché the teacher who was running the camp cast over the fact of our group’s admission.

I had a yellow journal that I wrote poems in. That’s all I wrote back then. Poems that often were written in shapes. There was a butterfly poem shaped as a butterfly. There was a rainbow poem in the shape of a rainbow. And today, I was thinking about the poem I had written in the shape of a big, fat question mark. The title of the poem, of course, was Why?.

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This is from The Intercept. It’s a video that if you are a Stephen Colbert fan, you might have already seen, but still, maybe stay with me so you can hear what’s wrong with this other than the obvious.

In coastal Alabama, there is a 62 year-old-woman who has been voted Alabaman of the Year after being apprehended (and tackled) for wearing a penis costume to the most recent No Kings rally in her ‘Bama town. That’s the fun part for her. The not-so-fun part is that she is facing trial later this month for her choice in apparel. But the even less-funny part for her is that her First Amendment rights were negated by a hometown boy offended by the site of a giant dick. The woman was also carrying a sign that read: “No Dick Tators”.

You can watch the video (the audio kicks in after a few seconds), which starts out kind of funny, and if the woman weren’t yelling about how much pain she is in from being pushed to the ground, hand cuffed, and then smashed into the cruiser while still wearing her penis suit, it becomes even funnier after it takes three cops to finally realize they can’t squash a massive member into the backseat of a patrol car. Eventually, one of them takes her cuffs off and helps her step out of her costume.

This interests me on a professional level. For one, when I was considering adding a crime beat to the news outlet I run, I enrolled in the local police academy so I would know what I was talking about. There is a citizens’ track at the academy, which puts regular joes like me through all the same training as the cadets, excepting fire arms training. (Yes, I even got to drive a cruiser in a car chase, and that is when I learned that under duress, I drive like Granny). The only other difference is that it’s only three months versus the cadet training averaging 6 months. Still, I did learn how to apprehend a criminal, and also learned what it was like to be apprehended.

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If you could get through to them, I think a lot of people would be surprised to learn that Jesus did not found America. Probably, these are the same people who are Christian Zionists. It’s okay. I don’t blame them. Because religion is synonymous with politics in America, it’s easy to be confused about history and who did what.

The truth is, men founded America, and not expressly according to Christian values so much as by their inner values which were predicated on a belief in Deism, a system of belief that doesn’t think god has much interest in interfering with us.

Still, our founders also seem to have accepted some enlightened principals that were akin to the mystic principles of Christianity prior to its co-option by the Romans who, after 450 AD, finally said sod it, if we can’t beat the Christianity out of these numbskulls, we’ll package and export it as our own product, creating the first international corporate monopoly. Of course, if your product is crap, it won’t sell, but this thing had some staying power.

Still, it’s unwise to underestimate the power of packaging, and now we have Christianity that is not just a religion but an American lifestyle brand with adherents who like to signal just how saved they are.

There are the mandatory gold crosses the size of telephone poles hanging from the necks of blonde babes who know things, and men’s tattoos of ornate crosses that may or may not mean the bearer of said tattoo is a Nazi, or that he actually knows how to achieve anything useful. Ever the expansionists, the brand managers in this Christian house of fashion are recruiting new influencers: Jews for Jesus. It’s so retro. Their tag line is “Bring Jesus back!”

The original Christian Jews were not the brain child of these Christian Zionists. No, they were the ones who, back in the 1970s and 80’s, stood politely near where you were about to board your plane, asking if you would like a pamphlet about how Jews missed the point of what Jesus of Nazareth was trying to tell them. (And you thought only Hare Krishnas used to hang out at airports, tucking daisies in your lapel.)

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