George Conway, the recently divorced ex-husband of former Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway, has launched a new political action committee aimed at preventing Donald Trump from returning to the White House in 2024.
The Anti-Psychopath PAC, as it’s called, will work to “highlight the existential threat Donald Trump poses to democracy and remind voters of the former president’s mental unfitness for office.”
[…]
“The failure to treat Trump’s behavior as pathological has led the media and the country, perversely, to treat it as normal,” Conway said in an interview explaining the rationale behind the Anti-Psychopath PAC. “And that’s a big reason why we’re seeing the double standard being applied to the candidates today.”
By Conway’s assessment, Trump’s concerning mental state and frequent bouts of erratic behavior have been brushed aside and normalized by the press and public. He hopes the new PAC can shift the narrative by rigorously scrutinizing Trump’s psychology and fitness for office to the same degree as President Biden’s.
This kind of thing just hurts all the regular non-fascist spicybrained people. He’s not dangerous because of a mental illness, he’s dangerous because he keeps doing horrible things on purpose with full knowledge and self control and the backing of other powerful assholes.
Being a psycopath/sociopath/narcisist is not a mental illness, but a personality disorder. The affected person does not suffer from it, but the surrounding people. It is dangerous, and it cannot be treated.
That is simply untrue. Personality disorders are a class of mental illness, and people definitely suffer from them. Both NPD and ASPD are in the DSM and have treatment available. I’m not saying they don’t hurt folks, but saying it can’t be treated is also not the way to go.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disorder
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocial_personality_disorder
Where in those sources does it say that it’s an illness? It says it’s a disorder.
Also, it states the prognoses is “poor”.
None of those things are true. True crime media’s misuse of sciencey sounding words is gonna be the death of us. Pds are mental illnesses, pds are treatable, and psychopath is generally a pejorative term for someone having an experience that the dsm would categorize as psychosis.
Edit: I want to add that the criteria for personality disorders is not cut and dry, but has a lot to do with social norms and a lot of marginalized people (i.e. women) get scooped up into those categories whether or not they actually fit them. Insurance (or other healthcare systems) also require diagnoses to pay for treatment, so the process is often sloppy and rushed. The truth is that mental illness categories are not irrefutable truths or a reliable way to tell much about an actual person from afar. They’re just different kinds of people + circumstance. So you really can’t say that “people with X are BAD and always dangerous”. You just don’t know. The world and people are just not predictable or simple that way.
The sad truth is that part of being a narcissist, psychopath, or sociopath is not accepting any flaws. These three types of disorders are self-sustaining; their inherent nature makes it almost impossible to change for the better.
They are classified as personality disorders because they involve stable, deeply ingrained patterns of behavior and thought, rather than episodic disruptions typical of mental illnesses. Treatment is challenging due to the ingrained nature of these traits, lack of self-awareness, and resistance to change. Cognitive-behavioral therapy and other therapeutic approaches can help manage symptoms but cannot cure the fundamental personality traits. The primary goal is to mitigate the disorder’s impact on the individual’s life and those around them.
