Allen Frances says he's tired of "amateur diagnosticians" insisting that U.S. President Donald Trump has narcissistic personality disorder.
And he should know. As the chair of the task force that wrote the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV, Frances literally helped write the definition of NPD.
In a letter to the New York Times, Frances, a retired Duke University professor, wrote that Trump "may be a world-class narcissist, but this doesn't make him mentally ill, because he does not suffer from the distress and impairment required to diagnose mental disorder."
He was responding to another letter to the Times — signed by 35 psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers — declaring Trump mentally unfit for the job of commander-in-chief. In doing so, they were flouting a longstanding American Psychiatric Association ethical policy barring mental health professionals diagnosing public figures from a distance.
'It's a very strange society that thinks that it's somehow worse to call Donald Trump mentally ill than to call him evil.'- Psychiatrist Allen Frances
Asked why he felt the need to respond, Frances told told As It Happens guest host Helen Mann: "I don't think Donald Trump qualifies for a mental disorder."
But make no mistake, Frances is no fan of the president.
"It's insulting — insulting to the people who have mental illness, who do suffer a great deal of distress and impairment — to be lumped with someone like Donald Trump," he said.
Frances has long spoken out against what he sees as a tendency to over-diagnose mental ilness, and he says he's especially weary when people do it to explain behaviour they don't like.
"When people are bad, they should be labelled appropriately and denounced for their behaviours. We should not use mental illness to slur someone," he said. "It's a very strange society that thinks that it's somehow worse to call Donald Trump mentally ill than to call him evil."
While he admits Trump appears to fit some of the DSM-V criteria for the disorder, that's not enough.
"Having traits doesn't mean you have a disorder. Having a personality doesn't mean that you have a mental illness. It also has to cause considerable, clinically significant distress and impairment," he said.
As for his colleagues? He believes they are well-meaning, but should find political avenues to express their concerns rather than resorting to "psychiatric name-calling."
DMV criteria for narcissistic personality disorder are:
Source: Mayo Clinic.