The "Normal" Paradox: Is Obama Mentally Unfit to be President?

Okay, before we start, let me make it clear: This is my thought. It belongs to me. I take full responsibility.

But the book I just finished reading, “A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness” by Nassir Ghaemi, has cleared the path for me to jump to this conclusion.

Dr Ghaemi is a professor of psychiatry at Tufts University. The book is hot off the press.

I will have much more to say on “A First-Rate Madness” and Dr Ghaemi in a bit. Let’s just say for now that this is the book of the year, that every word will give you something to think about (even the prepositions), that you need to buy it right now, that you need to read it cover to cover, and that you need to discuss it with everyone who knows how to breathe.

Okay, let’s get started:

Soon after election day 2008, I posted a blog piece on HealthCentral entitled, The Presidency: Temperament is the Real Issue. As you will recall, at the time of the election, the world was in economic free-fall. But the real concern was not the economy so much as which candidate possessed the best temperament to handle the crisis.

Virtually every babbling head at the time weighed in on the topic. Joe Klein, writing of Obama in Time magazine, observed: "His preternatural calm has proved reassuring ... "

By contrast, during the campaign, voters were unnerved at the spectacle of an impulsive and mistake-prone John McCain barely able to contain his rage. As I noted in my blog piece:

Obama was seen as "unflappable," in short, the type of person you would want first on the scene if you happened to be pinned under a car about to explode.

Okay, I take it all back.

A year after Obama took office, Jacob Weisberg, in a piece on Slate subtitled “How Obama's cool, detached temperament is hurting him and his party,” wrote:

His relationship with the world is primarily rational and analytical rather than intuitive or emotional. ... His tendency to focus on substance can make him seem remote and technocratic.

But Weisberg limited his analysis to Obama’s apparent failure to connect emotionally to the masses rather than his emotional incapacity to manage crisis. In short, when the center cannot hold, even Obama’s worst critics would agree that the last thing we want is a crazy person in the control room.

No! says Nassir Ghaemi most unambiguously. The last thing, in effect, we want is normal. According to Dr Ghaemi:

“No drama” Obama might be considered the epitome of mental health. We like our presidents moderate and middle-of-the-road - psychologically even more than politically. But psychological moderation is not what marks our great presidents. Can we applaud passion, embrace anxiety, accept irrationality, appreciate risk-taking, even prefer depression? When we have such presidents - the charismatic emotional ones, like Bill Clinton - we might have to accept some vices as the price of their psychological talents.

Dr Ghaemi is by no means the first in making a case for abnormal tendencies as leadership virtues. Joshua Shenk's 2005 "Lincoln’s Melancholy," for instance, brilliantly documents how Lincoln’s personal failures and his lifelong history of depression paradoxically molded him to take charge in the face of the greatest-ever challenge to the US.

As I noted in my mcmanweb review, Lincoln and His Depressions: “Lincoln’s melancholia allowed him to see events with preternatural second sight.” Dr Ghaemi refers to this as “depressive realism,” a gift shared by Churchill, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and others.

But Dr Ghaemi tells us a little bit manic is also a good thing, exemplified by FDR and JFK. The base temperaments (hyperthymic) of these two Presidents may have been poles apart from the likes of Lincoln and the rest, but what all these great leaders shared in common were lives characterized by struggle and personal setback. Thus - born different, shaped different. And in crisis situations, different - not normal - is what we want.

Crazy, in effect, is normal to us. You know it, I know it.

Thus, of all things, when crunch time came - while the world around them was going bananas - the crazy ones - Lincoln, Churchill, JFK and the others - turned out to be the sane, level-headed ones.

They stayed calm, they listened, they identified with others. Moreover, they grasped what needed to be done, took charge, articulated their vision, rallied their troops. And they acted. If something went wrong, they owned the disaster, learned from their mistakes, made the necessary course corrections, and rose to the occasion - again and again and again.

Here’s where it really gets interesting. “Normal” individuals, says Dr Ghaemi, are singularly unsuited for crisis. Their brains were built for handling predictable situations in quieter times. When the unexpected occurs, they are typically at a loss. What seems to be happening, according to Dr Ghaemi, is their world view is totally out of sync with actual events. They don’t know what to do. They make fatal mistakes that they compound by rationalizing and justifying. Thus, in the case of Nixon with Watergate:

Faced with the greatest political crisis of his life, he handled it the way [a normal person] would handle it: he lied, and he dug in, and he fought.

In a similar fashion, George W Bush went weird on us. But here is the punch line: According to Dr Ghaemi, both Nixon and Bush were perfectly normal. Call Nixon delusional and paranoid. Call Bush stupid and irrational. But you’re wrong on all counts, according to Ghaemi. Until 1973, Nixon was the most successful person on earth. And all through his life, everyone wanted to be friends with George W.

But when faced with crisis, both Nixon and Bush essentially lost their bearings. Can you see the stigma issue here? Dr Ghaemi certainly can. We’re afraid to attribute success to crazy, but we are all too quick to assign it to failure.

But Nixon had to have been crazy. No, says Dr Ghaemi. What looks like crazy were normal individuals reacting to crisis in a normal way. A crazy person (or at least the right kind of crazy person), in effect, would have reacted in a way that came across as normal.

Confused? Throw away your conventional wisdom, says Dr Ghaemi. Normal isn’t always an asset. And there are clearly times when normal is neither the rational nor the best course.

So, perhaps now you can understand the title to this blog. Where we needed a Lincoln or a Churchill or a JFK, we elected someone with an even temperament. Crazy world we live in.

***

This is the opening to many more blog pieces based on Dr Ghaemi’s highly illuminating “A First Rate Madness.” I am looking forward to your comments and to a lively discussion. Stay tuned ...

Don't miss it

Dr Ghaemi will be featured tonight - Mon, Aug 8 - on The Colbert Report. 

Onion News: Obama Has Bipolar

Citing "extreme self-confidence" and "euphoric, inexplicable sense of hope," Onion News reports that Obama has just ended a three year manic period that included his first six months in office. Now, according to The Onion, Obama is sleeping on a couch in the Oval Office, watching reruns of NYPD Blue.

Post Inaugural Reflections - Beyond Reason?

There were a zillion memorable images from yesterday's Day of National Jubilation, but the one that struck me most was that of a US Marine helicopter diminishing to a speck on the horizon.

The passengers on that flight were the former President and former First Lady.

Former President! It was over. The national nightmare had ended.

So can we now expect an era of rational government?

Not so fast. Two days ago, NY Times op-ed columnist David Brooks mentioned a book that came out in 1962, entitled, "The End of Ideology." The book reflected the thinking of the day, namely that the intense ideological-political schisms of the past were over. Now the country could settle down to rational governance and pragmatic decision-making.

The major flaw in the book, of course, was that this happened to be the Sixties. The Sixties! The Industrial Age and all its assumptions was numbered. The Information Age with all its uncertainties was crashing the party. Civil rights, Vietnam, women's rights. As David Brooks describes it:

"People lost faith in old social norms, but new ones had not yet emerged. The result was disorder. Divorce rates skyrocketed. Crime rates exploded. Faith in institutions collapsed. Social trust cratered."

The collapse of the old order intensified ideological conflict, as conservatives and liberals battled over whose values - social, moral, cultural, political - would prevail. For four decades, there was literally no let-up. Politics turned personal, nasty, ugly - crazy.

But nothing is permanent. Even before people had heard of Obama, a book by Rick Warren, "The Purpose Driven Life," implied that opposites were reconciling into a sort of probational equilibrium.

Obama's ascension to high office, Brooks argues, may be a reflection of this new order. Problems that were impossible to fix when people were at each other's throats - problems such as health care - may be doable now.

But here's the catch. Whether we are talking economics, politics, or personal relationships, the choices we make are never purely rational. We are in the thick of the worst economic-financial collapse since the Great Depression. Two things can happen:

The crisis may actually wake us up, concentrate our collective minds in such a way that, as a society, we actually start thinking rationally. Think of the limbic system on high alert, marshaling our frontal lobes into a state of preternatural clarity and awareness.

Or the crisis may stress us out in ways that throws reason out the window. This time think of the limbic system inciting our frontal lobes into a state of panic. We either blindly lash out or freeze like a deer caught in the headlights.

FDR's first one hundred days in office is the classic example of a rational response to crisis. Together, the country united to save Western Civilization.

By then, Europe was in the clutches of an irrational response. Fascist/Nazi governments were entrenched in some countries, Communists in others. The rest were flailing in pathetic states of conflicted indecision. Civilization didn't stand a chance.

Seeing that speck of a helicopter disappear into the miasma of a DC afternoon filled me with great - and admittedly irrational - joy. But that joy is tempered by my knowledge that our brains are not wired to think rationally. We are betting the success of the new Administration and the future of this country - our entire civilization, for that matter - on the totally opposite assumption.

Inauguration Day Reflections

I will keep this brief:

On the first Tuesday of Nov 2004, I went to my evening support group thinking I had fired the President. I returned to find this wasn't the case. Instantly, I spun into a depression. I couldn't focus on my usual work, so to keep busy I pulled out a book manuscript I had been working on. Two and a bit months later - this time four years ago - I had a draft I could show to people. In Oct 2006, HarperCollins published "Living Well with Depression and Bipolar Disorder."

I like to joke to people that I owe the book to George Bush.

Last November, I hired a new President. Let's just say I'm not working on another book.

FDR and Lincoln

We are one week away from inaugurating a new President. Reference has been made to both FDR and Lincoln regarding the challenges facing Barack Obama.

FDR was cut down in the prime of life with polio or a polio-like affliction. Not only is he unquestionably the greatest President of the twentieth century (by virtue of saving western civilization), his story of how his disability changed him into a better person is inspiring.



My FDR video is the first I shot using a camcorder. I was in Washington DC at the time - early May, 2008 - trying out my new camcorder at the FDR Memorial.


I shot my Lincoln Memorial footage later in the evening. My visits to both memorials were like a religious experience. I felt myself in the presence of something far greater than me. I read the words of both men inscribed on their respective memorials and felt the tears flowing.



Lincoln, as most of us know, was depressed nearly all his adult life. Of all things, his unremitting sadness and despair ennobled him, filled him with rare insights, and prepared him for the grim task ahead.

The crisis we are facing today equates to those that kept FDR and Lincoln awake late into the evening. There are many lessons to learn from these two great men, but the big one is the example they set in their devotion to a higher purpose and their empathy for the suffering of others. Their virtues are saintly ones, tempered by down-to-earth realism.

Hopefully, this is the example that the incoming President chooses to follow.

From mcmanweb: Lincoln and His Depression

"In Lincoln’s depressions, we see the illness in its full destructive horror, one that nearly succeeded in cutting short the life of a promising young man and made the rest of his existence miserable. This is the side of depression with which we can all unfortunately identify. But we also see an aspect to his depressions that equally resonates with us – how our suffering can strengthen us, ennoble us, and embolden us, often to achieve the impossible."