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Executive Function Disorder: They’ve All Got It…

… and we’ve got squads of psychologists, armed with the multimegaton DSM-5, to pick our presidents off one by one: George Bush ran into this guy (and not that I wanna do any armchair psychoanalysis, but the guy is a colleague, and we sat on an examining committee together once, and he spent his round of questioning listing his academic degrees and honors); and now our current leader has run into this guy.

UD‘s blogpal, Allen Frances, tries to introduce some sanity:

Among [John] Gartner’s most notable critics is psychiatrist Allen Frances, who wrote the guidelines for diagnosing narcissistic personality disorder — and who rejects any claim that Trump has it.

To meet the criteria for a narcissistic personality disorder, Frances said, Trump would have to display distress or impairment himself. One could argue he’s caused distress, Frances said, but he doesn’t appear to experience it.

“I think that this guy and other people like him mean well and are sincere and believe that somehow they have a professional responsibility to warn America about the horrors of Trump,” said Frances, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at Duke University. “But I don’t see them as knowing much about diagnoses.”

… The effort to apply a diagnosis to Trump, Frances said, “confuses bad behavior for mental illness.”

UD is exceedingly unfond of whatzisface, but rampant diagnosis-dumping is itself bad behavior.

Margaret Soltan, September 25, 2017 11:36AM
Posted in: march of science

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One Response to “Executive Function Disorder: They’ve All Got It…”

  1. dmf Says:

    no real science to diagnosing people in psychiatry but yeah shouldn’t be practiced at a distance (or in public) on strangers, is interesting that one can be ruled by antisocial (even destructive) compulsions and be blind/uncaring to the negative impacts on others and yet we only formally treat this pathological if you run into trouble that you can’t find other ways (including lawyers, etc) of managing, echoes of all of this in much of what you curate here.

    http://www.wnyc.org/story/football-brain-injuries-impossible-ignore

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