Inside Donald Trump's Brain: No Psychiatrists Allowed

"Is Donald Trump a sociopath?" conservative TV host Joe Scarborough recently asked on air.

"This is not a well man," Republican strategist Stuart Stevens tweeted.

"Is Donald Trump just plain crazy?" the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson wrote in a column.

"Narcissistic personality disorder. Trump doesn't just have it, he defines it," Harvard physiology professor Jeffrey Flier tweeted.

Questions and assessments concerning Trump's mental status have taken on a serious tone of late. As Trump lashed out at a Gold Star family, made up video of a secret U.S. money transfer and seemed to kick a crying baby and its mortified mother out of a rally last week, many prominent voices have started to openly and seriously question Trump's mental stability.

One group told not to diagnose Trump: actual psychiatrists.

Trump's mental state has become so widely questioned, that the American Psychiatric Association posted a blog on its website reminding members not to attempt to diagnose anybody who they don't actually treat.

"The unique atmosphere of this year’s election cycle may lead some to want to psychoanalyze the candidates," APA president Maria A. Oquendo, wrote, "but to do so would not only be unethical, it would be irresponsible."

Psychiatrists follow something called "The Goldwater Rule," which says they can talk about psychiatry and certain conditions in general terms but never attempt to provide diagnoses about people they have never treated.

The rule was created after Fact magazine in 1964 surveyed 12,356 psychiatrists about presidential candidate Barry Goldwater to ask whether he was mentally fit to serve as president. Of the 2,417 that responded, 1,189 said he wasn't.

After Fact published the results, Goldwater sued for damages and won.

"Simply put, breaking the Goldwater Rule is irresponsible, potentially stigmatizing, and definitely unethical," Oquendo wrote in her post.

That hasn't stopped non-psychiatrists from offering serious assessments of Trump's mental health.

Writing in the Huffington Post, Richard North Patterson wrote that Trump's behavior shows several symptoms of the clinical definition of narcissistic personality disorder:

With Trump ever in mind, try these. An exaggerated sense of self-importance. An unwarranted belief in your own superiority. A preoccupation with fantasies of your own success, power and brilliance. A craving for constant admiration. A consuming sense of entitlement. An expectation of special favors and unquestioning compliance.

A penchant for exploiting or disparaging others. A total inability to recognize the needs of anyone else. An incapacity to see those you meet as separate human beings. An unreasoning fury at people you perceive as thwarting your wishes or desires. A tendency to act on impulse. A superficial charm deployed to disguise a gift for manipulation.

A need to always be right. A refusal to acknowledge error. An inability to tolerate criticism or critics. A compulsion to conform your ever - shifting sense of “reality” to satisfy your inner requirements . A tendency to lie so frequently and routinely that objective truth loses all meaning.

A belief that you are above the rules. An array of inconsistent statements and behaviors driven by your needs in the moment. An inability to assess the consequences of your actions in new or complex situations. In sum, a total incapacity to separate the world from your own psychodrama.

Recognize anyone?

Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker offered a more personal assessment. She described a serious concussion she suffered in 2014 and said she sees a lot of the same behavior in Trump as she exhibited after the injury:

What is unique, at least among presidential candidates, is his utter lack of social skills in saying things that would get a schoolchild sent to the principal and very likely to a psychologist. The inhibitory filters that keep most of us from saying whatever pops into our head seem in Trump’s case to be on the blink.

Painful as it is to admit, I too displayed some of this same behavior in the first several months after my fall. Ordinarily polite, I was suddenly prone to interruptions and would blurt out things that never would have left the lips of my previous self. Temperamentally reserved, I became almost aggressive in telling anyone everything. Who was this person?

The only "official" medical diagnosis voters have is the enthusiastic statement released by Trump's personal physician in December. Dr. Harold N. Bornstein of Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan called Trump's health "astonishingly excellent" and said Trump would be "the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency."

Aside from that claim, the letter provided plenty of reason to doubt its legitimacy.

First, it opened, "To Whom My Concern."

Fair enough. People make mistakes. But Trump's campaign had described the letter as being from Harold's father, Dr. Jacob Bornstein. The letter was dated December 2015.

Problem: Jacob Bornstein died in 2010.

Image via Rick Uldricks, Patch