Doctor Who Wrote ‘Goldwater Rule’ Wants It Broken To Discuss Trump’s Failing Mental Health

For decades it has been taboo for mental health professionals to offer their medical expertise about politicians, thanks to the 1973 Goldwater Rule for mental health professionals. But now the doctor that crafted that rule believes that it should be broken so that professionals can openly discuss, and offer possible diagnoses, about what’s going on with Donald Trump’s mental health. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins explains what’s happening.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Ever since 1973, there's been a rule you could call it, with mental health professionals across the United States called the Goldwater Rule that basically prohibits mental health professionals from offering their diagnoses or really even their medical opinions on public officials that they have not personally seen for any kind of consultation. Now, the reason this rule exists is because in 1973, a bunch of mental health professionals wrote a paper that was published in a, uh, magazine that made some pretty outrageous claims about Barry Goldwater. And because of those claims and because the doctors had not actually examined him, Goldwater sued for libel and won. And then after that, a panel with the, uh, if I can find their name here, the American Psychoanalytic Association, got together and said, all right, here's the rule. Now you guys can't do this anymore because, you know, we just got a massive lawsuit, so stop doing it.

There's only one person left still alive from that 1973 panel, and his name is Dr. Allen Dyer. And Dr. Dyer this week, well, in an article I should say, published this week with HuffPost, said that it was time for that rule to probably go bye-bye, because Donald Trump's mental health problems are so severe that mental health professionals need to be allowed to talk about it. Here's what he said, and again, coming from a guy who helped write the rule, you know, almost 50 years ago is now saying, we gotta get rid of it, he said, quote, I find it concerning that he doesn't complete his sentences, seems to lose track of the question he's trying to answer or avoid. And that one thought doesn't lead to another, but appears to veer tangentially off track. He seems to be progressively cognitively impaired. He then went on to say, I would want to do lab studies, imaging studies, and a battery of psychological tests. One would want to know if this is dementia and decreased cognitive function. So this doctor, who of course is now retired, thinks that, uh, not only do we need to do the psychological tests, like we need brain scans, we need actual lab work. We need to see if his brain is even in one piece anymore. But of course, he can't come out and really say anything because of the rule that he helped put in place. And for the record, we have had scores of mental health professionals offer their opinions about Donald Trump.

Uh, most of them, and I have to give full credit to him anytime I talk about this, is with Chauncey de Vega, with salon.com, who has been talking to these mental health professionals for years in interviews for salon writing up what they're talking about and what they think could possibly be wrong with Donald Trump. But outside of that, few people have done that, and certainly nobody has done it to the degree that Chauncey de Vega has. But now we're at a tipping point. Now we are at the point where these mental health professionals need to be interviewed, not just for Salon. They need to be interviewed for the New York Times, for the Washington Post. They need to have a primetime slot on 60 Minutes on the Rachel Maddow Show on CNN. That's what needs to happen. But because of that rule, because of that fear of, you know, massive lawsuits because you haven't examined the guy, they can't do it. Even Dr. Bandy Lee, uh, who was one of the lead authors of the book that came out in 2017, the Dangerous case of Donald J. Trump, where you had all the mental health professionals writing about what they perceived to be the mental problems of Trump all the way back then, seven years ago, she was fired from her job. Listen to this Bandy Lee, uh, you know, contributions to the dangerous case of Donald J. Trump, uh, was a professor of psychiatry at Yale. Uh, Yale University was fired for that.