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29th August 2022, 12:30 PM | #2081 |
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29th August 2022, 01:42 PM | #2082 |
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One important element of severe mental illness is a disconnection from reality. More evidence:
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29th August 2022, 06:48 PM | #2083 |
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Mental illness is defined as a pattern of thoughts and behavior (as you said) that causes distress to someone or interferes in their day-to-day life (which you didn’t say). That second part of the definition is important.
When someone gets physically sick, it causes distress and interferes with day-to-day life. They seek treatment because they want to “get back to normal,” to be cured. It’s important then, to know the cause of the illness -to properly diagnose- so that the appropriate treatment can be found. This is the basis of modern medicine. Psychiatry is a part of modern medicine. The goal of Psychiatry is to relieve distress and restore day-to-day function as much as possible. As the APA says in one of the commentaries I linked to way back, the goal is certainly not to contribute to stigmatization of the mentally ill. When we start putting labels on people outside of treatment goals, that’s exactly what we are doing. We are saying that Trump is dangerous because he’s mentally ill. There’s no context there; there’s no deeper understanding in the general public like there might be amongst professionals. The public hears, “mentally ill = dangerous.”
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29th August 2022, 07:00 PM | #2084 |
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Donald Trump has 'dangerous mental illness' say psychiatry experts at Yale... Pt 3
If you agree, then it doesn’t make sense that you are OK with professionals linking “bad behavior” with “mental illness” in public discourse.
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As long as I we agree that mental illness doesn’t always cause bad behavior, then I don’t see what is gained in bringing up mental illness in public discourse.
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29th August 2022, 07:02 PM | #2085 |
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Crazy is as crazy does.
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29th August 2022, 07:49 PM | #2086 |
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What you're describing is the model of psychotherapy as treatment: "Doc, I wanna feel better." However, there is also the model of forensic psychiatry, which is not intended to help a patient but to inform and protect the community. A serial killer might feel great about what he's doing and hope to keep doing it, but authorities can order a psychiatric exam -- even against his will -- to determine whether he's fit for trial or whether he's a candidate for parole. The psychiatric assessment of Trump is closer to a forensic exam: "How dangerous is this guy?" By all accounts, Ted Bundy and the BTK Killer were charming.
I also note again that the President plays a unique role in our society, and he is endowed with unique powers. Trump's acolytes are now claiming that he can never be prosecuted for anything, in office or out. The conventions (I wouldn't even call them "rules") that apply for most of us if we see a shrink just don't apply to somebody who has access to the nuclear codes. |
30th August 2022, 06:22 AM | #2087 |
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Here's the context: Trump is dangerous because all of these things are true:
If Trump were mentally ill but also a good person, it wouldn't be a problem. If Trump were not mentally ill, but also a bad person, that would be a problem. On the other hand, there would be more reason to hope his evil could be moderated by his sanity. |
30th August 2022, 06:31 AM | #2088 |
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Again we can address the Elephant in the room
Good people with mental illness who aren't horrible manchild trolls don't have to be this defensive of a bad person with a mental illness who is a man child troll. Saying Trump has a mental illness isn't a direct personal attack on you. |
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30th August 2022, 07:34 AM | #2089 |
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Trump seems unable to moderate his behavior.
There are certainly times when all of us have that problem. But Trump keeps talking and working his way into deeper legal, political and financial troubles even when he he is given solid advice to do otherwise. To my way of thinking a mental illnesses is problematic when a behavior significantly hinders an individual's ability to function. It seems to me Trump has crossed that line. |
30th August 2022, 09:52 AM | #2090 |
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We would also hope that a sane person would recognize his own rational self-interest. Some of the worst things Trump has done, like his failed pandemic response, are the result of his delusional thinking. Literally hundreds of thousands of lives could have been saved if Trump had modeled wearing a mask from the beginning. Instead he refused because it wasn't "a good look," and he insisted it would all go away "like magic." He could have said that a deadly contagious disease is not a partisan issue. He could have been a national hero if he had acted on what was good for his fellow Americans. But he didn't.
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30th August 2022, 09:58 AM | #2091 |
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That makes it sound like Forensic Psychiatry is some kind of public watchdog group or something; no, it’s about applying psychiatric principles to legal and corporate contexts.
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Bundy and BTK both had histories of brutal murders. They did some really shocking stuff before they encountered the mental health system. We don’t have anything like that in Trump’s case. He was merely a businessman who had some success and a lot of failure. He was a celebrity who built a brand and used it to sell stuff. He didn’t murder anyone; he didn’t have any criminal history at all. He wasn’t a good guy by any means, at least in my opinion, but the comparison with Bundy and BTK (and the applicability of Forensic Psych in general) is way off base.
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I’ve made my ethical and practical reasoning very clear for years in this thread and there’s no need to keep rehashing everything all over again -it’s clear we disagree. |
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30th August 2022, 10:00 AM | #2092 |
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30th August 2022, 01:05 PM | #2093 |
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No. The last sentence of my post is part of my own logic.
You ignored that sentence, because your own logic is inadequate to address the point I made without pretending I hadn't written that sentence. Bob001 understood that sentence, and expanded upon it. You may have understood that sentence as well, but acknowledging that sentence would have been inconvenient for your argument, so you pretended the sentence hadn't been written. |
30th August 2022, 02:15 PM | #2094 |
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What I specifically agreed with and quoted was this which you did not include in your quote:
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I do agree that it needs to be made clear when a situation like a mass shooting occurs whether or not the shooter actually had a dangerous mental illness: the vast majority do not and have other motives. But you wouldn't know that by the way the gun rights advocates make that false connection in order to justify the lack of gun control: "It's not the guns, it's the mental illness" had become their go to excuse.
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" There are decades of recorded interviews with Trump, decades of documented behavior, decades of information from those who know him, etc." |
30th August 2022, 02:16 PM | #2095 |
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30th August 2022, 02:36 PM | #2096 |
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Do you think the mental health officials who think Trump has a mental disorder just read newspaper articles or watched TV stories? No. They have watched his actions, behaviors, and listened to his many interviews over decades. They've studied what family members, including his niece and sister, and those who have worked with him have said. These are objective assessment tools they have used. What we have is far more than doctors saying things like "I know dangerous when I see it". We have
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30th August 2022, 03:20 PM | #2097 |
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That last sentence is irrelevant wishful thinking that really has little to do with the argument you present. Fundamentally, you view the bad behavior as the problem, regardless of any present mental illness. I agree with that position. Plenty of sane people engage in bad behavior. Their sanity is not a mitigating factor. Therefore, their mental state is irrelevant. You laid out my position as to why mental illness is irrelevant pretty clearly. Even if you didn’t mean to. |
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30th August 2022, 04:53 PM | #2098 |
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30th August 2022, 05:31 PM | #2099 |
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Since you think I laid out your position "pretty clearly", I will continue to explain your position. It is of course possible that you will quibble with my ongoing characterization of your position, just as so many in this thread have had cause to complain about your misrepresentations of their positions.
On Monday, Donald Trump posted the following:
Originally Posted by Trump
Trump's mental illness is dangerous because his NPD is the source of Trump's grandiose delusions, which are dangerous because Trump's public posturing has led millions of people (of whom only a few are mentally ill) to share Trump's delusions, and we have seen plenty of violence motivated by those delusions. It seems, therefore, that xjx388 must believe at least one of these things:
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Last edited by W.D.Clinger; 30th August 2022 at 05:34 PM. Reason: rephrased final sentence for clarity |
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4th September 2022, 12:50 PM | #2100 |
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You present a false dilemma. I don’t believe any of those three statements.
I believe that it doesn’t matter what the underlying cause is of “Trump’s public posturing.” Whether it’s a delusion of grandeur, a genuine mistaken belief, blatant lying to manipulate his followers or some combination thereof, the result is the same: Trump says and does things that make him unfit to be President. Mental illness can exist without danger. Danger can exist without mental illness. Therefore, mental illness itself is irrelevant. What is important is the danger. |
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4th September 2022, 01:57 PM | #2101 |
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No one has claimed otherwise.
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A mental illness is defined by the behavior. That's why there are specific behavioral criteria for being diagnosed with a specific mental illness. For example, in the DSM-V, in order to diagnose APD, at least one of these behaviors must be present:
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4th September 2022, 03:02 PM | #2102 |
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Many people believe what Trump says, and believe that he will act in the nation's best interest. If they understood that Trump has a mental disorder that causes one to tell self-aggrandizing lies and to be motivated purely by self-interest, perhaps some of them wouldn't believe him or trust him to act in the nation's best interest.
I consider that relevant. |
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4th September 2022, 06:21 PM | #2103 |
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This is clearly false, as illustrated nicely by the next thing you say:
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Put another way, if the Yale Group had never come out with anything publicly, would you have been OK with the way Trump behaved? Of course not! You would have (rightly, in my opinion) condemned his behavior just as much.
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4th September 2022, 06:59 PM | #2104 |
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His followers and a large chunk of the voting public have heard the “dangerously mentally ill” stuff and have rejected it. 74 million people voted for him in 2020 after the Yale Group, et al, not only had their conference but spent a lot of time making the media rounds “warning” us about Trump’s dangerous mental illness. He may run again in 2024 and could even win again. This is a problem much deeper than one dude’s behavior. It’s the product of a deeply divided American voting public and a party who has learned they can tap the mistrust and conspiratorial part of that public for political gain. |
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4th September 2022, 07:35 PM | #2105 |
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Nope. I'm beginning to suspect you are either deliberately being obtuse or are just intellectually dishonest.
You said :"Mental illness can exist without danger," and "Danger can exist without mental illness." I said, "This is where your argument falls apart because you cannot separate mental illness from the behavior that results from that mental illness." Not all behavior that is a result of mental illness is dangerous. A person who has OCD is not dangerous. But the OCD BEHAVIOR and HAVING OCD are not separate. They are completely connected. One cannot exist without the other. Or do you want to contend that a person with OCD does not display OCD behavior and that a person with OCD behavior does not have OCD? I think it's obvious that danger can exist without mental illness. Will you at least concede that?
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4th September 2022, 08:59 PM | #2106 |
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That’s completely unfair. We disagree with each other completely. This doesn’t not mean that either of us is being intentionally obtuse or intellectually dishonest.
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The criteria says a person only needs one of the behaviors on the list. Being arrested after age 15 is on that list. However, it would be absurd to say that an arrest means that a person must have APD. There is more to diagnosing APD (or any mental illness) than checking boxes on a list.
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Someone lies a lot. I mean, maybe they do so because it’s connected to a mental illness. Maybe they do it because they’ve learned it gets them what they want. All I am concerned with is the fact that they are a liar. I’m not going to do business with them, I’m not going to be friends with them and I’m certainly not going to vote them into the Presidency. What good is the knowledge that the lying is connected to a mental illness? What possible difference could it make? |
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4th September 2022, 09:07 PM | #2107 |
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Yeah, sure, OK.....
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5th September 2022, 05:10 AM | #2108 |
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Shush! Stop talking about Trump being mentally ill. We need him to be certified of sound mind when he takes the stand in his own defense (then we will see the real crazy).
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5th September 2022, 05:16 AM | #2109 |
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With my highlighting:
You say you don't believe any of those three statements. Let's look at the logical consequences of the non-beliefs you assert. The most interesting of the three statements is Trump's delusions of grandeur are not related to his mental illness.There are essentially three reasons you might not believe that statement:
If you don't believe Trump has a mental illness, then you haven't been paying attention to his narcissistic personality disorder. If you don't believe Trump has a narcissistic personality disorder, then you should offer some evidence in support of your diagnosis of Trump's non-NPD. If you accept that Trump has delusions of grandeur and is mentally ill, and also accept that his delusions of grandeur are related to his mental illness, then you are essentially saying we should just ignore Trump's mental illness when contemplating the danger posed by Trump's delusions of grandeur. Yes, mental illness can exist without danger. Trump's mental illness, for example, would not be very dangerous at all if Trump were some homeless person whose homelessness has resulted from his belief that he's the king of France. Yes, danger can exist without mental illness. Indeed, most danger is unrelated to mental illness. Those things are true, but your conclusion does not follow: Mental illness is relevant in this particular case because, although mental illness is not always dangerous, and danger is not always caused by mental illness, the particular dangers I and many others have identified in this thread are associated with, and to a considerable extent caused by, Donald Trump's NPD, which is a mental illness. Yes, that danger is important. When a danger is important, identifying the cause of the danger is often important as well, because the cause(s) often suggest ways to avoid or to ameliorate the danger. In this particular case, it is important for you and millions of others to accept that Donald Trump's belief that he is the rightful president of the United States is a consequence of his mental illness rather than a consequence of facts. |
5th September 2022, 05:41 AM | #2110 |
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Yes, the problem is much deeper than one dude's behavior. You, however, are refusing to face the fact that understanding the reasons for this particular dude's behavior would help millions of people to understand that his delusions of grandeur are rooted in a mental illness rather than fact.
Yes, it is likely that there will still be many millions of people who never acknowledge Trump's mental illness and its contribution to the problem you deplore. It would be nice if you were not one of those millions of people, but that's for you to decide. |
5th September 2022, 06:19 AM | #2111 |
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You've been arguing that they SHOULD reject it!
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Demagoguery has been around for as long as there have been groups of humans. It's often a very successful approach to gaining power and, when successful, often turns out badly for everyone involved. I think narcissists are particularly prone to demagoguery and particularly dangerous when successful at it. It seems to me that if we willfully ignore our evolving tools for identifying such individuals before they're in power, we're condemning ourselves to a future that's at least as ****** up as our past. |
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5th September 2022, 10:06 AM | #2112 |
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I keep wondering what the tipping point here might be. I can understand the basic idea of not analyzing at a distance, and the gradation of mental issues that makes a difference between just a really nasty flawed character and someone who is actually mentally ill, but in a recent speech, Trump declared that Mark Zuckerberg visited him at the White House last week and begged to come to dinner with his wife. As usual, the apologists are counting this as a misspoken reminiscence of an event three years ago which might have slightly resembled it. But isn't there any point where a consistent habit of megalomaniacal delusion crosses the line, and it's reasonable for even a relative layman to say "that's crazy?"
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5th September 2022, 10:23 AM | #2113 |
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Do you think there is anyone here saying that isn't reasonable? It sounds like an incredible strawman to me. The people objecting to something in this thread are mostly (I think all) are objecting to thinking he can be diagnosed from a far, especially by lay people who have only read a few pages of the DSM.
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5th September 2022, 01:09 PM | #2114 |
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First of all we need to be very clear about what I’m arguing. I personally believe in my heart of hearts that Trump is crazy and obviously deluded. I mean those terms in a colloquial sense because I am not a professional and I’ve never met the dude. He acts in irrational ways; dude is crazy. So I am NOT arguing that Trump is not mentally ill. I am not apologizing for or excusing Trump in any way shape or form. Quite the contrary, I am saying he’s actually dangerous. I AM arguing that the mental illness label doesn’t give us any more information than simple observation of his behavior gives us. “Trump’s mental illness makes him dangerous,” is no more descriptive than, “Trump is dangerous.” Nothing of any value is added by labeling him as mentally ill. My questions are pretty simple: “What does the public gain by understanding that his behavior stems from a mental illness? What are we supposed to do differently because we now have this knowledge?” My answer to those questions is, “Nothing.” Further, using mental illness to describe someone as dangerous is very problematic. In public discourse, we really shouldn’t be using words like “crazy,” “delusional,” “mentally ill,” etc to describe dangerous or otherwise problematic behavior because it is stigmatizing to people who suffer from mental illnesses, who are by and large not dangerous or problematic. And of course, I have ethical problems with professionals issuing opinions on people they’ve never met. |
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5th September 2022, 01:49 PM | #2115 |
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Here's what the public gains by understanding that Trump's behavior stems from a mental illness: The public gains a viable, evidenced alternative to the idea that Trump's belief that he is the rightful president of the United States is rooted in fact.
When describing Trump's behavior, words such as “crazy” and “delusional” are entirely appropriate. In my opinion, as in the opinion of many qualified professionals, it is obvious that Trump's narcissistic personality disorder is a root cause of Trump's belief that he is the rightful president of the United States. Although narcissistic personality disorder is seldom dangerous, it is dangerous in this case because of the influence Trump's delusions have been exerting over the beliefs and deeds of millions of Americans. The fact that Trump's mental illness has helped to create that danger is not stigmatizing to the vast majority of people who suffer from similar mental illnesses but do not have enough influence for their mental illness to become a significant danger to the lives and well-being of others. When you or I express our opinions, neither your non-NPD diagnosis nor my NPD diagnosis create any ethical problems. It seems, however, that you often fail to recognize how your unprofessional non-NPD diagnosis is just as much a diagnosis as my unprofessional diagnosis of NPD. |
5th September 2022, 01:54 PM | #2116 |
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Not really, no. I’ve been arguing that professionals should not have entered the fray to begin with. Once the message is out there it becomes a much different problem: what are we supposed to do with the information? If the answer is, “listen to the small group of professionals who are acting against the ethics of their profession,” I think that’s problematic. I don’t generally think members of the public should have distrust towards medical professionals. However, I equate this to other ethical breaches by medical professionals. When Dr. Oz, Dr. Axe, Dr. Mercola, et. al. make their unscientific, self-serving and ultimately, unethical claims, what is the public supposed to do with their “information?”
This is the fundamental problem for me. I do believe that unscientific and unethical pronouncements by doctors should be rejected. But how does the public sort it all out? Why is Dr Mercola’s information bad but Dr. Lee’s good? I think they are both bad because they deviate from sound, established clinical practice and current medical knowledge as reflected in standards of care and ethics. Do I personally think Dr. Lee et. al. are putting out blatant misinformation? No, not really; they are certainly acting unethically, though. Now…I’m married to a doctor, manage and consult for medical clinics and have a good grasp of the issues. The average member of the public does not and does not have the tools to differentiate between Mercola, et. al. and Lee, et. al. They don’t understand the ethical issues. They don’t know good medicine and bad.
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But one fact I understand quite well is the trust the public puts in “the White Coat,” and the “MD” after someone’s name. I believe that the actions of Oz, Mercola and the Yale Group abuse that trust. They are saying things in public that are not supported by the standards of their profession. Such abuse comes with a price: mistrust.
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In any case, I’m not against professionals in the field speaking out. I am against them acting outside of the standards/ethics of their profession and publicly tying “mental illness” to “dangerousness.” They can discuss problematic behavior without diagnosing or even bringing up mental illness. |
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5th September 2022, 01:55 PM | #2117 |
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5th September 2022, 02:15 PM | #2118 |
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5th September 2022, 02:29 PM | #2119 |
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5th September 2022, 03:07 PM | #2120 |
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Yeah, keep mentioning the niece that has been involved in tens of millions of lawsuits with him. That will certainly convince me this is appropriate.
Just 90 health care professionals today? Thought the number was 70,000. If it's only 90 I wonder if you've thought about giving creationism in the schools another shot? |
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