Prescription for Survival 2022: September Update

By the World Mental Health Coalition

It is time to review our Prescriptions for Survival and to urgently issue three major new prescription additions.

We are all Mental Health Professionals from many countries committed to the universal health professionals’ pledge, the Declaration of Geneva.  In 2017, after holding an Ethics Conference at Yale University School of Medicine, we published what became an unprecedented bestselling book: The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.  Our purpose was to meet our professional responsibility to society. 

The World Mental Health Coalition, which formed out of these events, rapidly grew to thousands in number and is today the premier mental health organization dealing with dangerous leadership and threats to collective mental health.  Throughout 2017 and 2018, we had numerous media appearances and met with many members of Congress.  Then in March 2019, we convened a major Interdisciplinary Conference, broadcast in full by C-Span from the Ballroom of the National Press Club in Washington, DC.  Subsequently, we have continued to speak out in media appearances, in both public and private settings, in publications, and at universities.

Then came the unforeseen emergency of the Global Pandemic.  Given our initial concern that the then U.S. President was psychologically incapable of reasonably handling such a crisis, we issued our original “Prescription for Survival” during the very first month of the Pandemic, warning:  “We have a Presidency that is … making a global pandemic deadlier,” and we urged intervention, which included the 25th Amendment.

At the time, we urgently Prescribed five actions to ameliorate the suppression and subversion of medical science resulting from having such a dangerously unfit person wielding Presidential authority.  Had our recommendations in the original “Prescription for Survival” been followed, the majority of the more than 1 million in the U.S. who died from Covid would still be alive. 

Three times again in 2020, as the Pandemic killed an unprecedented number of Americans and brought about tremendous economic and mental suffering, we updated, enhanced, and reissued our original “Prescription for Survival.”

In August 2020, in our first Prescription for Survival Refill, we stated: “Because the Coronavirus Pandemic was tragically, and perhaps criminally mismanaged, we have more than 175,000 deaths, more than 5.5 million known cases, and economic misery for many.  We must emphasize that most of this could have been prevented, had our original Prescription been heeded.”

A few months later in November 2020, in our second Prescription for Survival Refill, we stated:  “Never before has the government failed the American people in such an ongoing, unnecessary, and deadly way….  The country is now experiencing a far more critical and rapidly escalating Pandemic with sickness, death, and economic devastation of the kind we warned would result but could have been prevented.”  We added: “The deadly mental disturbances of the current President have had other harmful consequences….  He is inciting violent disruptions to a peaceful transfer of power….”

Then the next month, on December 21, 2020, we issued an Emergency Update stating: “Clearly the Trump Administration has grossly failed our country and is guilty at least of criminal negligence for mass death.  We are on the way to a half-million deaths, unprecedented triage in hospitals.”  Already fearful that the incoming Biden Administration was not sufficiently preparing to take the urgently needed actions we added: “When government officials, regardless of party … confuse public discourse so that the citizenry is unable to look after its own interests properly, they present a public health hazard that health professionals must respond to.”

And earlier this year we stated: “Now at this two-year anniversary of our initial Prescription for Survival, we are confronting multiple emergencies on many fronts.  The gross mishandling of the Pandemic has further exacerbated economic inequalities and resulted in tragic failures to deal with the escalating climate crisis.  Global conflicts are accelerating, even raising the risks of Thermonuclear War.  Furthermore, we now face an increased likelihood of new Covid variants.  Underlying this ominous world situation is an overall crisis of collective mental health….”

All of these Prescriptions for Survival in full are at PrescriptionForSurvival.Org.

Now, in September 2022, with about 1 of every 300 Americans dead from Covid, and with nearly 500 persons still dying daily of Covid, the United States has still not taken the necessary steps as urged by the medical and scientific experts.  Consequently, we feel the imperative to add the following important additions to our previous prescriptions. 

1) A full and complete investigation into the true origins of Covid must be pursued.  There is now substantial and credible reason to believe that the Covid Pandemic virus may have originated in secret U.S. government bio-laboratories from which it “leaked”.  If the government will not fully and honestly pursue this investigation, the academic and scientific communities, as well as the major media, must do so independently and vigorously.

2) The Pandemic is not over.  Officials are continuing to mislead the public for self-serving political reasons.  There are serious worries that a new vaccine-resistant and more deadly variant could emerge; or that a new Pandemic virus could occur.  Our country as well as our world are not properly prepared, even though we have the capability to be.  Consequently, our previous recommendations to empower and substantially increase cooperation and funding for the World Health Organization (WHO), as well as to insulate the National Institute of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and academic experts from political and pharmaceutical company interference, take on ever greater urgency.

3) The mental health of the most powerful individual in the nation wielding Presidential powers should be taken seriously.  Any Board of Directors that did not properly confirm the acceptable mental health of its CEO would be legally liable.  All military personnel who have anything to do with nuclear weapons must yearly submit to a psychological assessment, except for the Commander-in-Chief.  We renew our plea to the leaders of our country that a professional mental health standards be applied to the U.S. President and those in the immediate line of succession be required and that reforms be made to the 25th Amendment so as to render it actually usable and not just theoretical.