Mental health professionals are starting to open up in public about the mental health issues among liberals experiencing Trump Derangement Syndrome. The Los Angeles Times, an anti-Trump paper, published an unintentionally revealing article (hat tip: Instapundit) on the extent and severity of TDS among the affluent liberals on L.A.'s Westside:
In her 35 years as a therapist, Arlene Drake has never heard so many clients talking about the same issue. Week after week, they complain of panic attacks and insomnia because of President Trump. They're too anxious to concentrate at work. One woman's fear turned into intense, physical pain.
"It's just a nightmare," said Drake, who practices in West L.A. ...
Therapists nationwide say they've been overwhelmed by the strong feelings triggered by one of the most divisive figures in modern political history.
I do not remember a similar outbreak of mental health problems among conservatives upon the election of Barack Obama, who promised a "fundamental transformation" of America. This suggests that liberals are less emotionally stable than conservatives and supports the long expressed thesis of Michael Savage that "liberalism is a mental disorder."
The LAT article reveals a startling fact that supports the contention that TDS is a public health issue:
Some patients who support Trump say they feel isolated because they can't share who they voted for in their workplace or home for fear of being harassed or called xenophobic or misogynistic. ...
Opening up about voting for Trump has already stoked conflict with family and friends. One therapist mediated a case in which an adult son threatened to cut off his relationship with his parents because they voted for Trump.
In other words, TDS sufferers are inflicting their anger on others. They are thus a public health hazard. But of course, the LAT cannot openly make such a statement and instead seeks to portray the issue as equally affecting Trump supporters (emphasis added):
It's almost become irrational in terms of the anger people feel toward each other and the boxes they put each other in," he [therapist Allen Wagner] said. "I feel for the people on both sides.
Ahem, the anger and aggression are one-sided, coming from the TDS sufferers.
I think that it is now time to form a nonprofit foundation devoted to alleviating the suffering of TDS patients, for they affect not only themselves and their families, but also the general public, whom they attack on suspicion of insufficient hostility toward the elected president of the United States. They are a hazard to the rest of us. Public service commercials should be broadcast on television and radio stations urging sufferers of TDS to get help. As a first step, complete disengagement from politics seems a reasonable therapy.
Worst of all, mental health professionals are beginning to corrupt their profession owing to shared feelings with the TDS crowd:
Drake was trained not to reveal her personal beliefs, but now will agree with clients if they say they don't support Trump.
"If this were just another session, if this weren't such a big thing, if this weren't so evil, I wouldn't," she said. "But I have to stand for what I stand for and that does cross over into politics." ...
Over the summer, William Doherty, a professor at the University of Minnesota and a therapist in St. Paul, published a manifesto online declaring Trump a unique threat to America's mental health. More than 3,800 therapists signed it. ...
He formed a group last month called Citizen Therapists for Democracy to consider issues raised by Trump's presidency. Therapists aren't accustomed to advising patients on how to handle this kind of "public stress," since psychotherapy has traditionally been limited to private lives and psychology, he said. ...
Mental health professionals have also debated whether to diagnose Trump himself. Though some have publicly done so, an ethical standard known as the Goldwater Rule prevents psychiatrists from diagnosing public figures without personally evaluating them.
In 1964, more than 1,000 psychiatrists said in a magazine survey that then-presidential GOP nominee Barry Goldwater was psychologically unfit to be president. It was an ethical misstep that might have eroded confidence in psychiatry, wrote Maria A. Oquendo, the head of the American Psychiatric Assn., in a statement last year reminding members to abide by the rule.
There are so many absurd fantasies about Trump that are widespread among liberals – that he is anti-Semitic (with a beloved daughter who is Jewish!), that he is Putin's puppet (yeah, right – that's why he is encouraging fracking that would devastate Russia's heavy reliance on oil prices being high), and that he is somehow authoritarian (by wanting to reduce the power of the unelected bureaucrats to makes laws).
It is time for the wider community to counsel TDS sufferers that they are ill but that they can receive help. Counseling, disengagement from politics and, if all else fails, medication.
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