The Psychology of Trump Contagion: An Existential Threat to American Democracy and All Humankind, Chapter Eight

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Chapter Eight

Institutional Complicity and Individual Corruption

In the previous two chapters, we expounded on the psychological dynamics of Trump Contagion.  Now, we will shift gears to discuss enabling forces.  Donald Trump would not be where he is today without institutional and individual compromise, but he corrupts them, also, such that they together form an accelerating, vicious circle.  Like any other communicable disease, this contagion does not depend just on the offending agent, or pathogen, but on a facilitating environment, or corruption.  Foremost among the facilitating institutions of Trump Contagion, far more than the public is aware, was the American Psychiatric Association (APA).  Mental health was the defining feature of an unprecedented presidency, and the APA faced the choice of whether to keep with the principles of the field to help contain the pathology, or to take the path of less friction to enable it.  Astonishingly, it chose the latter, and hence began our societal mental health crisis.  At this time, mental health knowledge was “inconvenient”, and the APA’s task was to remove all mental health experts from the media and therefore from public discourse.  The full historical meaning of these actions will be difficult to quantify at this time, but we already know that the crisis of democracy, the loss of more Americans than all the wars following the Civil War combined, the dismantling of the World Order, and our collective “Death Spiral” would not have been possible without Trump Contagion—and education was our only defense at the time.