Dr. Allen Frances - Trump, Mental Illness, and the End of Reason

"Calling Trump crazy allows us to avoid confronting the craziness in our society—if we want to get sane, we must first gain insight about ourselves. Simply put: Trump isn’t crazy, but our society is." - Dr. Allen Frances

This week on the show we interview one of the men who literally wrote the book on mental illness as we answer the question - Is Trump crazy? And what does it say about America that he was elected to the highest office in the land? Psychiatrist Dr. Allen Frances analyzes the national psyche, viewing the rise of Donald J. Trump as darkly symptomatic of a deeper societal distress. Drawing on his vast experience, Dr. Frances explains American society’s collective slide away from sanity and offers an urgently needed prescription for reclaiming our bearings.

Dr. Allen Frances chaired the task force that produced the fourth revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental disorders, which is is published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and offers a common language and standard criteria for the classification of mental disorders. He then became critical of later versions, and he warned that we are currently "over-treating" mental disorders and finding problems where there are none. Dr. Frances is professor emeritus and former chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science at Duke University School of Medicine.

He is author of the new book, Twilight of American Sanity: A Psychiatrist Analyzes the Age of Trump.

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