So What about Joe Biden?

I Will Answer a Repetitively-Asked Question

I am continually asked why I only write, speak, and warn about the dangers of Donald Trump and “Trump Contagion,” but have little to say about Joe Biden.

So let me briefly answer this question.

I start by emphasizing that I have never considered myself a political person.  I am a highly-trained psychiatrist with a medical doctorate, residency training, fellowship training, and clinical as well as teaching experience for over twenty-five years.  My entire career has been practicing and educating about mental health issues and public health concerns, especially in the area of violence prevention, about which I have authored an authoritative textbook by the title, Violence (Wiley-Blackwell, 2019).

When I began warning against Donald Trump, I did not approach my writing, speaking, or teaching from a partisan or political perspective but a medical one, with my eye squarely on public health and safety, and a civic one, in the sense that I expect to share my gifts and knowledge, like everyone else in a democratic society.  Indeed, before Trump’s election I had little interest in politics per se, and as I consulted with policymakers, governments, and international bodies on violence prevention and prison reform, I became well-seasoned in keeping my domain separate as a scientist providing medical facts and research evidence, not political opinions.

Above all, mental health abides by a different paradigm that politics, that of health versus disease, and operates with the same medical neutrality as does the rest of medicine.  Therefore, Donald Trump’s dangers had to do with the fact of a severely mentally-disturbed person having presidential powers—including access to technology to obliterate the human species—as a matter of life and death far beyond politics.  This is why I assembled the most renowned members of the psychiatric profession at Yale School of Medicine in April 2017 and then published our bestselling book a few months later.

The issues concerning Joe Biden are not of the same type at all, as I have written before.  Yes, I may personally find Joe Biden to be disappointing and troubling, not just in style but in terms of policies, especially internationally.  However, I should not and have no reason to use medical terminology to advance my personal opinion of him, just as I had no reason to “use psychiatry as a political tool” against Trump, as Jeffrey Lieberman and the American Psychiatric Association (APA) misconstrued our actual fulfillment of the APA’s ethics code, Section 7.1, to be (in part because of their own political agendas).

True, one could observe Joe Biden and those he has empowered to be primarily guided by political, personal, and party considerations, though Biden continually tries to present himself as otherwise by performing his own version of “gaslighting”.  However, in medicine, a physician’s duty to protect health and life translates into an obligation to warn others when matters reach the threshold of danger to self, others, or the public.  With respect to Joe Biden, the dangers are not at the personal level but at the larger level of structural violence.

Currently, I believe our nation and the world are in great danger, where few structures are exempt from being self-destructive and harmful to our collective health.  Our public health system, for example, is so overtaken by corporate profit interests, that it undermines health care for all.  Our justice system is more accurately an “injustice system” that metes out “punishment” to the poor and disenfranchised, more than to those who actually commit crimes.  Our national wealth is continually drained from the public to fuel increasingly dominant and insatiable military and “intelligence” establishments.  Our tax system is cripplingly weighted to further enrich and protect the wealthy.  Our political campaign finance system functions as legalized bribery.  Our educational system, as I have personally witnessed at Yale, has been infiltrated by both corporate and government money and influence, resulting in severe repressions of academic freedom.

As the double-talk and what seems like political tribal allegiance cause our governing institutions to lose their credibility, many citizens are searching for new information sources through podcasts, social media, Substack, and other “alternative” media platforms.  Many also fall prey to opportunistic, “cultic programming” sites, which are complicit in worsening the conditions that have led to growing alienation, distrust, and violence.

Of course, much more can and needs to be said about these things, but for now I return to Joe Biden.  

A recent article asserts: “We need a serious conversation about Joe Biden’s brain.”  But as the article itself makes evident, the issues with Biden are consistent with normally declining cognitive acuity associated with age, which his speech impediment accentuates; they are not existential dangers. Should Biden and all other commanders-in-chief undergo a mental capacity evaluation by qualified, independent, and nonpartisan mental health experts, even before they take office and annually afterward?  Yes, that is what we at the World Mental Health Coalition have repeatedly emphasized, including in our “Prescriptions for Survival.”

Mental health experts are routinely retained and contracted to perform mental capacity tests all the time—as mandated by courts, by governing bodies, and by employers.  It is not exceptional to demand this of a commander-in-chief; rather, it is extraordinary that all subordinates are required to be screened, whereas the person with the greatest responsibilities is not.  This is a situation that needs fixing, if we wish to press for a democracy that is more than in name only.

Today’s politics, more than ever before, are dominated by extreme military-industrial-corporate-CIA manipulation, coupled to multiple mechanisms of propaganda and mass mind control, with more and more private-sector corporate payoffs for those who “play the game.”  At times like this, “mainstream media” and elite universities actually contribute to fixing the power structure in place, rather than to providing meaningful challenges, as they are supposed to do.  As a result, our country is in desperate need of not just significant reforms but of major systemic changes for true democracy, justice, public welfare, and equal rights for all to be possible.  I continue to believe that the public deserves and needs to hear from mental health experts—especially when the most relevant field, in the midst of a collective suicidal drive and existential risk, is applied psychiatry.  In a time when we could all benefit from learning about human behavior, mental health education can awaken a public awareness that leads to a more corrective understanding and a process conducive to healing.