A professor of psychiatry at Tufts University and a back selling author. To talk to you thank you very much for your time. Thanks for inviting me now you are joining us from. Austin area which has been under water. And its a funny question to ask if i buy a house same thing you are obese point on this scale oak once its not. How saying that you said yeah yeah how same yours are recent same or same from me theyre both amusing yeah well theyre related and. I would say a sickness on sanity i would say on a scale one thats and im probably an 8 right now and thats a pretty high and the reason im asking is because in 2011 you published and very counterintuitive loke said jaffery being a bit unstable especially at on be a manic depressive romp has its advantages at its time of a time of crisis now i know that your book focuses primarily on political leaders but i wonder if one can observe this same extract in lay people to of can we find follows that you know our depression and our restlessness may actually make. Batteries think carries our bad Decision Makers in times of uncertainty yes so might my book a 1st rate man this was published back then as you know that was really trying to understand what are the benefits of having some psychiatric conditions a focus on manic depression and i think the show showed that there were some traits that were more present in depressed people like realism of empathy and more traits some traits present in many people creativity and resilience to stress and i think point brought this out in leaders but i do think it applies to regular persons like you say you know time of crisis like now for instance it might be in some ways easier for someone whos had depression to be able to manage staying at home all the time and not having much to do because when theyre depressed thats the way they feel its more of a shock to someone whos normal mentally healthy and has never had that experience or point is sad perpetually manic i think him that exact thing a lot. Right through with maybe you know its you know this is defined it really means being sped up in your thinking movement and feeling its the opposite of depression or your slow down so a manic person is always highly active and doing lots of things and very sociable and and and out there and to be in a room or a house fire self is the opposite of what america person would normally do now in your book you made the argument that the very qualities that marty does with will does or also provide for a batter and executive function specifically in times of how exactly does it work. So there are those 4 traits that i described which really i think make up a psychological recipe for great crisis leadership being more realistic and empathic than most people thats from the depression and being creative and resilient thats from the mania and so when you look at great historical leaders like Winston Churchill. John Kennedy Franklin roosevelt you see in these people that they have these traits they either have a full blown manic depressive illness or bipolar illness as call or they have these traits as part of their personality all the time a little bit an example would be churchill who had very severe depressions and during the 1930 s. The most famous Wilderness Years as he called it when he was out of political power and nobody listened to him he was very depressed but at the same time was extremely realistic about the nazi threat while almost all politicians of all spector in anyones really were in denial about it and i think thats an example of where the depression brings out the realism that makes you a great attorney now you are now undef various. You know that many sex ask people im mentally unstable and perhaps its that im in Mental Illness that powers them through but i think many psychologists these days believe that it is a compound satori a coping adaptive mechanism will learn this children and that mechanism has to be dispensed with if one wants to be happy and how he you know a content in his own adults can trace and are you arguing otherwise. I am i am im not the 1st person to describe this the 1st person was there a sato and he described very well as fame one of his famous questions when he asked why is it that all great men in politics poetry and philosophy have melancholia but yeah im saying Something Different and some things that ive seen not only in general but also in some of the interviews youve done with other psychiatrist oksana or peoples heart about how symptoms are bad and symptoms are a problem im actually saying the opposite im saying the symptoms are good and the illness is not and the illness is actually helpful in some way when the symptoms are severe they can be disabling and deadly but they also have a positive i have to say i am very partial to a psychologist and psychiatrist in fact ive been into tiny myself over the last couple of weeks by reading a lot of the union and alchemical as psychology at which talks a lot about prima materia base that cave is that crap to america psyche outweighs the refined substance or gold as they refer to it is produced but i guess to most people may be a dad being a bit crazy is good isnt it south a bit crazy how has your blog been received. Well probably for that reason is been received positively and negatively i think the positive reaction has been has been actually frankly much bigger than i expected and very heartwarming i think there are a lot of people that they read the book and it clicks for them that they really 1st read madness and they have the same intuitions and i just explain for them why it makes sense and there are other people who for whatever reason have a very harsh negative reaction to it and they take it almost as a personal attack if i were to say that if youre mentally healthy the you are maybe not as good at some things as someone whos not mentally ill while in here and you specifically said that if youre mentally healthy you may not be as good at making us basically be a leader as somebody who is. Mentally unstable or mentally control like. A crisis leader now i did make it with an important distinction theres 2 kinds of leadership crisis leadership and non crisis leadership that im talking about in noncrisis leadership when things are stable and theres peace and prosperity in the past predicts the future and you just have to make the trains run on time a mentally healthy person is a better leader but in crisis periods when you need creativity and risk taking and a different way of thinking those mentally healthy meters actually are not as good as these men have now and there is a row now i really are sorry playing on the internet dad when mike milbury became president shanks actory chief of staff thats here earliest white house Kerry Stewart read your book havent you been able to confirm whether its joe im not well i havent looked into it myself in but i and the rumor or was that the idea comes from the spoke by Jonathan Karl front row at the trump show and karl has his sources that this was the case and i would trust his sources i think its that i have no reason to disbelieve it i think one thing we can take away from that is someone very close to the president. Saw him and one of the same lines of what ive been saying which is that i think he has mild manic traits you know these kinds of manic type symptoms of being high energy very high physical and Sexual Energy is well known he doesnt sleep much hes very talkative he has excessive selfesteem which you can call narcissism if you like these are all class america traits which we call high person i mean over the clinical term that i described in my book and i its interesting to see that someone close to him saw a resident resident perhaps but hes also somebody who makes an impression on him very resilient tourists and the way he responds big criticism i think he has some very very mixed can and as you point out in your book resilience is most often associated with an early trauma i mean you need to have a trauma as a sort of that seems to allow you to develop resilience and you are seeing you in some jazz that you know doesnt show depressive symptoms but i mean how would you know what he is like when he is on on his own if he is wrong with himself. No you cant know for sure. We should probably point out that the American Psychiatric association has a goldwater rule which is that you should not make public statements about safety afric judgments public so you are a member of that group and weve debated this in their meetings and i dont agree with it and theres a substantial minority of members of the a. P. A. That dont agree with it my rationale is that there are some objective publicly known facts that you can make judgments about as long as youre going to get any politically neutral kind of way so in the case of present trump if for instance we just just say that the assumption that hes not a cross theres your baseline he says hes not ok is not but thats a disadvantage in my view because then he would be less realistic and less empathic than might otherwise be and i think thats what we do see a measure we as well actually he made me perfectly to my next question because i would understand why people around trying to explain his political expedience here compare him to was there churchill or john kennedy apprehend lincoln you know when you describe in your book and all our beliefs you have had. Many depressive symptoms is it the manic pari or the depressive party that has most us act on that Decision Making. Well i think they both can have a fax it depends on. What to what the symptoms of the person actually are and what the decisions are so the manic part will make you creative so for instance Franklin Roosevelt used to say of Winston Churchill that he had a sows an ideas a day 4 of which were good so those 4 good ideas are helpful other depressive part makes you realistic or empathic so many tastes of every him like him for instance you have a great deal of empathy for africanamerican slaves which other people didnt. And that influenced his political Decision Making in that way and that history also knows me examples of magnetic examples i should say of magic depressives which he plays probably the most prominent and in your book you suggest next larry if i understood your correctly was essentially stripped down be pretty tacky at powers of his Mental Illness by the end catchments reach here where it was found on the continuous basis throughout the war does that mean that hitlers crimes are not only his but at least in part his doctrine. Yes so you know as you can see this brings us into some very controversial area that i should probably just put out there 1st that everything im saying is my own opinion and doesnt reflect the views of my employers at all so thats. When i need to make when we get to hitler and i think the there are a lot of questions and there are a lot of people that want to believe that theres especially in germany its that shit cant have been abnormal in any way because then you cant blame him for what he did and thats not necessarily the case you know we know and in the law that someone can still be held liable for a crime even if they have a Mental Illness so we should put that out there in the case of drugs whats interesting is that hitler had a very severe depression from late childhood adolescence onwards its been pretty well established by contemporary memoirs and he had been between the depressive after the press i was so scared manic periods where he really high energy for weeks and months on end then talkative. And he got treated for the depressions in the mid 1930 s. Without sounding means which were new at the time and the very 1st class of antidepressant treatments probably then felonies as they can make you manic they didnt know that at the time and he got the drugs not orally in pills like churchill to put intravenously jackson on every single day when he woke up in the morning or 937 until the day you die and if you get intravenous and fed to me every day and you have bipolar illness i think the average psychiatrist would know that thats going to make you a whole lot worse basically is going to make you manic and can also make you delusional and psychotic its very probable that the gradual change of hitler and that went on at some relationship to that tree i mean we have to take a short break now but were going to be back in just a few moments. Welcome to max kaiser financial survival guide. To your pension account. This is what happens to pensions in britain. You watch kaiser report. As the u. S. Economy was booming growing numbers of people were made homeless. You can work 40 hours in a week and still not have enough to get housing everybody believes america still is the land of opportunity the reality of those who were not financially equality and the lack of Affordable Housing for a living minimum wage gave many people no choice you know thats been a problem with the city and all those turn to return told to stay way out of homes. Its worth it if there is no answer because yes of course resource the most vulnerable are abandoned on the streets to become the invisible cops. Are. Welcomed back to worlds apart dr unless theyre gonna make the offer all madness im covering dealings between layers ship and Mental Illness doctor got me as i mentioned before your book was published in 2011 before the election no dole tromp who made the psychologist describe as well lets call it mentally a centric and he clearly as you sat has his manic trade hes definitely not the american president do you think his uniqueness serves america well add the time of unprecedented and so. Well you know my general thesis was that a manic depressive leader is helpful in a crisis but is not helpful in a noncrisis period and i think the donald trump was elected in 2016 when we were not in a crisis i think his problem in the last 3 years was when it says were fine he was causing a lot of. Instability and trouble in a way by messing around with various aspects of the Political Economic system that actually had been functioning fine and that led to a lot of conflict in division in the country. Now that were in a crisis you would think that maybe hed be in a position to do well but his problem in my view is that hes manic and not depressed in other words hes somewhat mentally abnormal not abnormal enough to actually. Want it so. Yes its see i think this claim that when people say hes mentally eccentric as you said often it comes from a political motivation but i also heard you say that the president did not respond to what you called realistically to be khurana virus and make and im not sure anyone in the world actual media 3 have a 3rd of the global population under various forms of lockdowns all the while the if you give me only just around the world i still debating the wisdom hope its total quarantine i mean that i think there is agreement that i really have to be isolated by. You know the fact of putting everybody and locking up everybody in their homes it is still highly debated isnt it actually proven to be skeptical about issues like that especially because they entailed such huge economic and psychological that minutes weve never had before and so theyre certainly reasons to. Be uncertain about it but let me make you give another concept here psychologists say that normal Mental Health involves what they call mild positive illusion that means the normal mentally healthy person is a little bit unrealistic and in normal life thats a good thing in a way because were a little optimistic and we truly try things we might not otherwise try and it can work out but when youre a leader in a crisis there is no room for unrealism so when this pandemic started a month or 2 ago the normal mentally healthy of the leaders had a little unrealism to them and therefore they didnt respond us quickly as the should have but im leader with some manic traits. Is even less realistic and then is even more in denial and i think thats what we see now motivating denial of what i mean there is a difference between an. Being a senator well i mean these folks with her credit card you know we should all exhibit a healthy dose of skepticism theres a difference between quarantine skeptics and science skeptics for example or you can be a skeptical requirements and what the scientific reasons especially when you have a virus breach. Im sure you were you know that already had the majority of carriers. No symptoms at all on mild symptoms and the wisdom of halting the entire economy reach where it was what the democrats were calling for in a is highly questionable and you can also question whether they really ask for that out of the goodness of their hearts or out of their experience for the population pressure absent being motivated by certain Political Considerations 50000 people have died this is a very serious thing and i think that the realism. Is maybe going to be more clear with time but most my view would be that earlier action would have been better and he was certainly very slow its the other thing that i would point out is empathy which is not a depressive trait which he has not so much of the Washington Post recently did a analysis of his 13 hours of his press the briefings in which he spent about 2 hours. Attacking political opponents president trond acting in good exhibits signs of a narcissistic personality and as im sure you would agree have of be narcissism that isnt very highly correlated with most southworth sure narcissists are not unlock with themselves they actually hate themselves jason its a Good Practice to constantly speak to people lie dont all chomp down all the time then weigh the prize emera contrast that that even you know and the trend of the kind of damage i am not putting him down completely is im saying i think yes positive traits in terms of creativity and resilience which of manic traits and for instance is having all these press briefings the. Her reflection of stamina leases and i think that was and intends to do something positive and has some positive impact. And he did break some rules for instance with the with the who rational bill where he was essentially giving social Welfare Benefits to people which goes against the kurds and as keep close to fly while it was an absolute no go i mean seriously what he did that led to the lies and after the lucre and after mature everybody around him and i and they and they turned out to be a wise little yeah we didnt cause the flies to europe very quickly but theres and theres pros and theres cons i do think that also i dont take the perspective that his narcissistic which is a larger discussion i think the concept comes from a psychoanalytic way of thinking which may or may not be correct and which has scientific weaknesses as well as some strengths my perspective is more biological in manic traits are inherited and you know you can have excessive selfesteem as part of that you call a narcissism if you like it may or may not have anything to do with experiences and childhood we just recently knew offer a theory various hand avrils and how to survive it and that may and what about was a low limit on the watching and likely president ial press conferences is that a psychological or political advice. Well i say. My politics dont agree with his thats a personal assumed but psychologically i think its not helpful to people to be watching things that are really just a matter of opinion i also said you shouldnt watch cable opinion use of either id i think that all that does is d make people more anxious and. I recommend of the people watching news news not opinion you know what about down our government and Governor Andrew Cuomo who has conferences are just as likely would you advise americans of new yorkers against watching those great briefings as well. Thats a good question i personally have not been watching the the his press conferences the clips ive seen of them have been impressive but. I havent watched them enough to be able to give you a good answer to. Have. I saw that you wrote recently that the challenge for america and the world is to be about we not me and i actually think that a president trying time governor Governor Cuomo present day so rare example of that they seem to be more accommodating and more respectful of one another than the customer is acting in the in the United States business theres definitely last nastiness to their interactions doesnt that. A mortal or how do you work with a lab reach a person that you dislike for the sake of lets say either people or for the sake of your country. Now slowly i mean i think that the divisions that weve had over the last few years which have worsened because of the current president s leadership are things that we need to get over and i think its something that we have to do with more empathy towards each other which as i said is not a common normal psychological trait i think and may also be a practical. And useful example for many of us who are stuck at home with people a lot but not necessarily like all the time i think the proximity of the last year weeks has been. Very overbearing and now a days we all need this. Disassociate from the immediate and a personal and sort of female larger picture and broader meaning would you agree with that. Oh yes definitely i mean i think one of the benefits of the corn scene and we should be looking for some Silver Linings is you know its an opportunity for growth for personal growth as well as social growth you know how we react to the crisis is going to determine who we will become and then. One place we can go is to reconnect more with our immediate family or with our friends in a way that we did when we were distracted by the usual activities of life here a lot from my friends now is that while during the 1st new weeks they were very motivated to do things they never had time for nowadays many experienced apathy demotivation lower Energy Without necessarily be anxious a worry of how can people deal with big corral a System Agency waited out or tried here over comet and some on their way. Right one of the there are 2 big problems that have been found inside a psychological studies of quarantines in the past and that is boredom and anxiety and anxiety least touched on boredom i think is sort of what youre talking about and what we lose with not having the usual this calling germans i got her 1st time universe of life you know getting up and going to work at the same time having school at the same time and so on we lose the structure to our lives and now we have to provide a structure ourselves and so its important even though youre at home even though youre working like you are now from home and i am that you get up and start working at a certain time and stop working at a certain and try to keep some of that structure going otherwise its easy to feel disorganized or at loosens now dr ghani many psychologists say these days that social distancing doesnt have to mean social isolation and i think many of us have seen our comedic ation rich family and friends intensified and yet as one of my friends remarked recently there is a lot of talking but there is not enough communion and i think she was referring to based president s knees eco crabs and. People that we miss a lot and without it life feels very mediate it rather than real do you understand what im talking about. You know on the one hand we should be thankful for the fact that we have this quarantine of the time when we have this technology that we do such as the video conversation were having now if this had happened 20 years ago im not sure how the world would have handled it well im sure 20 years ago it wouldnt have happened to anchor ara this is a relatively new concept that for the sake of a limited group of people we have to write everybody that never happened before not for this length of time prior quarantines were a couple weeks long at most with ebola for instance and so on. But you know you could argue that maybe if we had the capacity it should have been done in 1900 with the flu pandemic. But the bottom line is that the Digital Technology does help part of the way but theres a lot of research for instance that you can summarize in a way by saying that nonverbal communication is about half of all communication and thats what were missing and thats what you cant really have unless you are increasingly with someone else. Well i mean we have to leave it here but thank you very much for sharing your. Thoughts. And thank you for watching state say you stay sane and hope. Next week on worlds apart. All. Of. The world is driven by shaped by one person. Thinks. We dare to ask. As we have said from the very beginning russia gate is a hoax and a fraud there is no evidence to prove and what explains trans flip flop on the iran nuclear deal. We have the resources. And you know already. The courage and we have the compassion and. The strength