'Tangentially off track': Doctor who wrote rule says it should be broken for Trump
The co-author of a decades-old rule limiting psychiatrists from sharing professional opinions about political leaders says it should be broken in the case of former President Donald Trump, according to a new report.
Allen Dyer, a retired George Washington University psychiatry professor, told the Huffington Post Tuesday that the American Psychoanalytic Association's 1973 "Goldwater Rule" should not stop discussions about Trump's apparent mental deterioration.
“I find it concerning that he doesn’t complete his sentences, seems to lose track of the question he is trying to answer, or avoid, and that one thought doesn’t lead to another, but appears to veer tangentially off track,” Dyer reportedly said.
“He seems to be progressively cognitively impaired."
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This comment from Dyer is noteworthy considering he is the last living member of the ethics committee that developed guidelines for how psychiatrists should express views on political figures.
The guidelines were triggered by a "Fact" magazine questionnaire in 1964 about former Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) and his mental fitness to serve as president, the Huffington Post reported.
"Among the views they shared from respondents was that Goldwater was a 'latent homosexual,' that he 'hated and feared his wife,' and that he was conflicted because his father was Jewish and his mother a Protestant," the Post reported.
"Goldwater sued Fact for libel, and in 1968 won."
Years later, the committee urged psychiatrists not to offer diagnoses about people they had not examined. The rule made few headlines until 2016 when Trump won the presidential nomination, according to the report.
Suddenly mental health professionals began to question their ethical responsibility and openly challenged the ban by speaking out about the then-70-year-old's faculties, according to the report.
Bandy Lee, a professor of psychiatry at Yale University, was fired for her contributions to the 2017 book, “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Professionals Assess a President.”
Trump's words are again raising concerns as he confuses names — repeatedly mixing up former President Barack Obama and President Joe Biden — free-associates about his favorite fictional serial killer and uses obscenities in public.
Dyer pointed to Trump's claim to Catholic priests that Vice President Kamala Harris was a "s---" politician and discussions of golfer Arnold Palmer's penis as warning signs of "disinhibition," or cognitive deterioration.
“I would want to do lab studies, imaging studies, and a battery of psychological tests,” Dyer said. “One would want to know if this is dementia and decreased cognitive function.”