Greetings,
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:
