Mental Illness

Writing about mental illness for my newest book, THE LOST LANGUAGE OF CRAZY, has awakened me to the the possibility that we all have that "crazy" part inside us. There is a question the dad in the book constantly asks: What came first, the chicken or the egg? The implication is people are born mentally ill-or did a precipitating event in their lives make them that way? This makes me regard our president differently: with a little more compassion. The signs of his mental illness are evident: the endless tweets, the rants against anyone who he perceives has insulted him, the idea that on any given day, he can switch his point of view dozens of times. He has no sense of audience, no self-control. I had heard his dad mercilessly made fun of him when he was little; perhaps this provides insight into why his sense of self-worth is so diminished that he must lash out constantly. And he perpetually lies.

People make fun of him, myself included, but being so intimate with mental illness, maybe it is SAD that today, as we speak, he wants to launch an investigation into PROOF that he won the popular vote. This is called delusional, and this is serious, not comical. Why isn't he getting help?  And what about his tweet showing him punching a man with a CNN face; he is actually on the floor fighting. This is total insanity, and everyone has to know this.There is good therapy, medication, so many ways of being treated. Not getting treated, however, put our lives as Americans at risk. That is what is scary. He is BAD to himself, and-as a consequence-he is bad to the world!