The President’s Brain

I don’t know if Presidents, like clergy, are required to undergo psychological testing in order to be deemed fit to serve. Mental health advocate Patrick Kennedy argues that those elected into the highest level of public service should routinely have a “check up from the neck up.” The job is stressful. The President, in order to best serve this nation, needs support from mental health professionals. 

I say the same thing about clergy. Anyone who is in a position of authority and service needs to be in good mental health. The pressures of the job and constant need to respond to crisis after crisis impacts our brains, making good mental hygiene critical. 

If the President has a mental health challenge, then I hope he gets the best care possible as soon as possible. The odds are good that he currently or at some point will suffer from a form of mental illness. One in five Americans will in any given year. Why not the President? I have compassion for anyone who is experiencing the pain of mental illness, in all its various forms.

I understand why people are calling the President crazy. It’s a way for people to explain his behaviors and the rhetoric. 

But here is the danger: it’s like jumping to blame a mass shooter’s actions on mental illness. We don’t want to look at the complex web of causation. We want a simple answer: he’s nuts.

The thing is, in the history of this nation, it is not always a matter of sanity or insanity that influences which side of history you are on. Were those fighting to preserve the institution of slavery insane? Were the confederate soldiers all mentally ill? Sure, some were. But most of them were faithfully living out an ideology, cultural norms and values passed along to them generation after generation. 

I want our President to get a mental health screening and to share the results with the American public. Then we can put to rest the question of whether or not his Presidency is impacted by mental illness.  People who live with brain diseases are capable of great things; even being President.

Stop calling the man nuts. It’s an insult to people with authentic mental illness. We might be a little difficult sometimes, but we don’t go around violating people’s human rights. That is something else entirely, and you can’t take little pills to treat it.