America has a mental health problem. The Boston Globe reported this week on a “mental health crisis in Rhode Island schools.” A Lafayette, Louisiana, news outlet reported on a “mental health crisis” in the state’s jails. In the upper Midwest, a handful of American Indian tribes claim social media is causing mental health problems among tribal children. Worrisome as these and other reports are, things could get exponentially worse.
One analysis of what may lie ahead comes from former ABC News Political Director Mark Halperin. During an October 15 interview with Tucker Carlson, Halperin was asked how Democrats might react in the event Donald Trump wins a second term. “I think it will be the cause of the greatest mental health crisis in the history of the country,” predicted Halperin.
He was not being snarky or facetious. Halperin said he was “100 percent serious,” and went on to say, “I don’t think it will be a passing thing that, by the inauguration, we’ll be fine. I think it will be sustained, unprecedented, and hideous, and I don’t think the country’s ready for it.” This mental health crisis will be marked by “alcoholism, broken marriages… workplace fights, fights at kids' birthday parties,” and possibly worse.
Halperin isn’t some right-wing bomb thrower. Beginning in 1988, he covered politics for ABC News, later working for MSNBC, Time magazine, Showtime, Bloomberg and other outlets. Halperin’s star continued rising until 2011 when he described Barack Obama as “kind of a dick,” resulting in a brief suspension from his duties at MSNBC. His fortunes further declined following criticism that his analysis of the 2016 election wasn’t sufficiently contemptuous of Trump. The next year, he faced a number of “Me Too” allegations. Today, he provides political analysis for Newsmax.
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Halperin is not alone in raising mental health concerns. In a review of the Kamala Harris interview on Fox News Wednesday evening, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told Sean Hannity that this election has him “worried,” about what he called “two enormous threats.” One, according to Gingrich, is “people who are on the left - so paranoid, so frightened, so out of touch with reality, you don’t know what they’re going to do. And I think this is a very real problem, with almost - a mental health kind of problem.”
What Gingrich and Halperin are describing is colloquially known as Trump Derangement Syndrome. TDS, the successor to Bush Derangement Syndrome, has been applied to over-the-top criticisms of Trump for the better part of a decade. But is TDS a real psychological thing?
Bernard Goldberg thinks so. The Emmy Award-winning journalist and 28-year veteran of CBS News was no fan of Trump in 2016. Yet a few weeks before Trump’s inauguration, Goldberg wrote of “a full-blown epidemic,” of what he characterized as “the dreaded mental disorder known as Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Goldberg provided one of the earliest critiques of TDS, writing, “the people who have brought me closer to the president-elect are liberals with TDS, who I find more annoying than Donald Trump - and much more deranged.”
Psychological clinicians are more circumspect but allow for the possibility that TDS is an actual mental disorder. Dr. Rob Whitley, an associate professor of psychiatry at McGill University, wrote that among mental health professionals, “some have even suggested that (Trump’s) opponents are experiencing a specific mental condition—a condition which has been labelled ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ (TDS).”
In a 2019 column for Psychology Today, Whitley reported that few psychiatrists advocate adding TDS to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. But he did notice how manifestations of TDS align with the “clinically significant disturbance in an individual's cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior,” which medically describes a mental disorder.
“Many have argued that some people have been seriously disturbed and distressed by the policies, speech, behavior, and tweets of President Trump, so much so that it has affected their cognitive, affective, and behavioral functioning,” wrote Whitley. He concluded, “Such people may need mental health support.”
The establishment media which previously employed Halperin and Goldberg are more likely to affirm this mental disorder than help people get over it. Commentators on MSNBC, CNN and similar outlets - along with elected Democrats - will not only affirm this mental disorder, they will agitate and exacerbate it. Why would they do that?
Vladimir Lenin wrote of the importance of “popular agitation,” in promoting Bolshevism across Russia more than a century ago. He cautioned, “It is very difficult to do this in Western Europe and extremely difficult in America, but it can and must be done, for the objectives of communism cannot be achieved without effort.” Propaganda and media bias have been around for a long time but when that propaganda is designed to agitate Americans suffering from a mental disorder, something is dreadfully wrong. The word ‘evil’ comes to mind.
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