By John Chapman Urbaitis, M.D.
[February 1995; Vol. 22 No. 1]
Just before the last November elections, the Sunpapers published an article by a freelancer which discussed a recent published opinion on President Clinton’s presumed psychological problems. The article continued with an attack on the several hundred psychiatrists who 30 years ago (no less, it was 1964!) rather unwisely responded to an inquiry by a pollster on the psychiatric fitness of Barry Goldwater for the Presidency. In fact the APA condemned that expression of poor judgement by its members, a condemnation that the authors of the Sunpapers article misstate as not having occurred.
This rather worthless manifestion of an uninformed and prejudicial attitude by a minor academic however, got me started thinking on the subject of the intersection of psychiatry and political science. Is it legitimate to say that we should not express our opinion on the impact of mental illness on public life and indeed history? Who would deny that Hitler and Stalin’s psychopathology had a lot to do with their unprecedented inhumanity? Or can we deny that Winston Churchill’s virtues rose above his alcoholism? Perhaps the problem is that to bridge two disciplines, in this case psychiatry and political science, one should know a lot about both. Most psychiatrists know little of political science or history. The fact that lawyers or rhetoricians believe they can pontificate on Psychiatry should not sweep us into a trend to amateurism as displayed in the above cited article. A good dose of humility may be the best preventive tool from errors in judgment whether we venture into political science, psychohistory or the entertainment field.