Perhaps it isn’t surprising, given the intense rhetoric of this year’s presidential election, that politicians have started throwing around accusations of insanity.
In early August, California Rep. Karen Bass, a Democrat, launched the hashtag #DiagnoseTrump and started a change.org petition claiming the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, meets the diagnostic criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Not long after, Trump called Hillary Clinton “unstable,” and at a rally in New Hampshire said, “She’s got problems.”
The candidates’ verbal volley highlights a persistent stigma about mental illness in politics. In the past, an admission of mental health problems was a death knell to political careers. In recent years, a few members of Congress have been open about getting treatment for mental illness, but they remain few and far between. Nevertheless, there’s good evidence that even some of the most beloved presidents in American history might have met the modern criteria for mental illness.
Heroic ideal?
The presidency is a high-pressure job, and one that Americans typically view through almost a fairy-tale lens. [The 5 Strangest Presidential Elections in US History]
“Americans have a version of the presidency in mind, the textbook presidency, that bears very little relationship to the actual job of being president,” said Jennifer Mercieca a historian of American political rhetoric at Texas A&M University. Political scientists talk about “heroic expectations” for presidents— that they’ll be generally good-hearted, magnanimous and well-meaning. Their health, both mental and physical, is a part of these expectations, Mercieca told Live Science.
“There’s definitely a politics of ‘fitness’ for office,” she said. “Using that word as a pun.”
In not-so-long-ago elections, mental health issues stalled political ambitions. Perhaps the most famous example was Thomas Eagleton, the 1972 vice presidential pick of Democratic Party presidential nominee George McGovern. Only a few weeks after being chosen, Eagleton withdrew from the ticket after it became public that he’d been treated withelectroshock therapy for depression. He went on to a successful career in the Senate, and then worked as an attorney and professor until his death in 2007.
Some politicians have sought to be open about their mental health struggles. Lynn Rivers, a Democrat from Michigan, who served in Congress between 1995 and 2003, was open about having bipolar disorder. Sean Barney, a Democrat who is running to represent Delaware in the House of Representatives, has spoken about coping with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from his time in the Marines in Iraq, where he was left partially paralyzed after being shot by a sniper. Ruben Gallego, D-Arizona, is another Iraq-veteran-turned-congressman who has talked about seeking help for PTSD.
In the executive branch, however, candidates and presidents have been mum on their own mental health. When John McCain ran in the Republican presidential primary in 2000, he faced a whisper campaign alleging that he was mentally unstable from his time in a Vietnamese prisoner-of-war camp. He released his medical records to the press to counter the rumors.
Presidential pressure
Attitudes toward mental illness have changed since Eagleton lost his shot at the vice presidency. In 1990, Florida gubernatorial candidate Lawton Chiles disclosed that he was taking the antidepressant Prozac. His competition in the Democratic primary, Bill Nelson, said the prescription raised “serious questions” over whether Chiles would be able to perform as governor. But Chiles won the primary, and went on to defeat the Republican nominee and incumbent governor in the general election. When reached in 2015 by Politico about that race, Nelson said, “Knowing what I know now, I never would have said such a thing about [Chiles] or anyone else.”
Although the understanding of mental illnesses as biological diseases —and no more