A Funny Thing Happened on Our Way to Alerting the Public …

… About one of the greatest mental health emergencies in the history of this nation.

We would not even have thought twice about it: we see a danger, and we report. For a danger as great as a threat to all human civilization, especially in a public servant who is in place to protect the people, of course the public had the right to know. Every mental health professional assesses danger, in every person one sees, every day, and passersby on the street are not exempt, as we have a professional duty to respond to emergencies. Having devoted decades to studying and treating violence-prone individuals almost identical in presentation to the president, I believed I had an extra advantage in recognizing the dangers, and hence extra responsibility. But it did not take a specialist in violence to see what I saw: many of my colleagues felt the same way. I thought, therefore, that if enough of us spoke, our professional organizations would help consolidate our message.

The opposite happened. One among many mental health organizations and the only one to have the so-called “Goldwater rule,” the American Psychiatric Association (APA), came out with a surprising “reaffirmation” of this obscure rule that many psychiatrists had not even heard of, since it was considered outdated since the 1970’s and all but invalid since 1980 when our diagnostic system entirely changed. We went from diagnosing based on introspection to observation around this time, and reliance purely on interviews gave way to depending heavily on others’ reports. I still…