XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, alt.politics.homosexuality, alt.politics.libertarian
XPost: alt.psychology, talk.politics.guns, free.woke.racist.democrats
Yes. In fact, we probably already did.
Political taboos, campaign dealbreakers and electoral glass ceilings
are crumbling. Members of Congress are openly gay and bisexual,
there’s a black man in the White House, and a woman may be next.
Voters have accepted all sorts of behavioral warts and missteps in
their political candidates, too. DUIs? A mistake of their youth.
Draft dodgers? There’s a long list. Womanizers? A much longer list.
Illegal drugs? In just a few short elections, we’ve gone from a
president who “didn’t inhale” to one who openly admits using cocaine
in his youth.
“Any vulnerability can be exploited by people and will be,” explains
Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House and presidential
candidate, whose late mother had bipolar disorder. “That’s just the
nature of a very rough-and-tumble-type business.”
As a result, the notion of politicians merely consulting with a
mental health professional remains the topic of only hushed
conversations or forceful denials. When President Bill Clinton
admitted to infidelity and impeachment loomed, talking to a
psychiatrist remained a political nonstarter. Aides told reporters
that Clinton was seeking the counsel of Christian ministers but was
“not under any medical treatment for any psychiatric or mental
condition.” Even two decades later, “crazy” remains a politically acceptable epithet, whether it’s Obama taunting Republican opponents
or Representative Trey Gowdy quipping that he did not want to
wrangle members of the House in a leadership position because he did
not “have a background in mental health.”
Yet, a review of the historical record finds that past commanders in
chief, even well-regarded ones, struggled with mental health
problems throughout their presidencies. “It’s a cliché that you have
to be nuts to run for president,” says Evan Thomas, the journalist
and historian whose latest book is an intimate biography of
President Richard Nixon. “Like most clichés, it’s at least partly
true.”
Nixon and John F. Kennedy clandestinely filled their medicine
cabinets with psychotropic drugs, recently uncovered documents
reveal. In fact, Kennedy aide and historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
suggested in his journals that several modern presidents were
mentally unbalanced; he recorded top aides arguing whether President
Lyndon Johnson was clinically paranoid or a manic-depressive, and
fretted that there was no constitutional “procedure for dealing with
nuts.”
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/10/politics-mental- illness-history-213276/
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