In the wake of President Donald Trump calling former President Barack Obama a “bad (or sick) guy,” and declaring, without proof, that Obama tapped his phones, mental health professionals across the nation are once again diagnosing the current president as mentally unhinged, unstable, and unfit to serve as president.
As Allen Frances, the psychiatrist who wrote the criteria for the disorder that mental health professionals use to label Trump—narcissistic personality disorder—noted, Trump may be “a world-class narcissist but this doesn’t make him mentally ill.” And as Richard Friedman wrote in a New York Times Op-Ed piece, “it is unethical for [mental health professionals] to diagnose mental illnesses in people they have not examined and whose consent they have not received.”
On May 27, 2013, however, the day that a long-awaited (nineteen years), newly revised edition of the “the psychiatric Bible”—the DSM-5 (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders)—was published by the American Psychiatric Association, another diagnostic manual appeared: The Diagnostic Manual of Mishegas (DMOM). Happily, this manual provides us with an accurate and sound set of criteria by which to determine the president’s mental and emotional states.
The DMOM, based upon a manuscript by Dr. Sol Farblondget (MD, PhD, PTA), uses as its epigraph a line from Gershem Orwell’s novel, Funny Farm: “All men and women are meshugah, but some men and women are more meshugah than others.”
“And let me tell you,” Dr. Farblondget told us in a recent interview, “this man is totally meshugah, and I mean totally. And he is also farmisht, fartummelt, fardrayt, and yes, farblondget too. Obama is the bad, sick guy? Ha! I think what we got here is a classic case of projection. And what we also got is a kvetch, a momzer, a gonif, a schmuck, a chalaria, a chazzer, and a world-class putz.”
The DMOM is mercifully shorter, at seventy-four pages, than the thousand-page DSM-V, and instead of unintelligible run-on sentences about phenomenological sub-groups and numerical codes that allow for clarification of pertinent factitious, dissociative and Appendix-related disorders, the DMOM contains common-sense definitions one can reasonably apply to Trump.
The DMOM’s “Categories of Mishegas” is divided into four sections: “Nervous Conditions,” “Cockamamie Conditions of Character,” “Categories of Mishegas Relating to Age, Food, and Sex,” and an “Appendix Relating to Ethics and Matters Otherwise Unspecified.”
What we did—and what we recommend to readers—is to join “categories of mishegas” to President Trump’s lies, distortions, delusions, nonsensical statements, and dangerous pronouncements and policies.
Thus, under “Cockamamie Conditions of Character”:
2.6. Momzer. A momzer—literally, a bastard—refers to any mean-spirited, nasty, untrustworthy, unscrupulous, detestable man…. One cannot say that a momzer truly suffers from mishegas, for that would imply that momzers are victims. But a momzer spends his life victimizing others, and is a victim, if at all, due only to his innate pathological nature. When a momzer is also a macher (a big shot), the combination is deadly.
Think: Mexicans as rapists, intelligence officers as Nazis, denigrating war heroes, grabbing women by their pussies, cheating at golf, climate change as a hoax invented by the Chinese, etc.
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