Last week NPR published an interview with Politico reporter Dan Diamond wherein he proposed that candidates be required to have a full medical evaluation by a third party collection of medical experts.
CORNISH: So one alternative you’ve written about to address this is having an independent board of, I guess, medical professionals who would issue this, you know, clean bill of health to the candidates. How would it work?
DIAMOND: The goal would be a nonpartisan panel – much like we have a nonpartisan panel picking the frame of the presidential debates – would find medical experts who could assess all the serious candidates, looking at their vitals, looking at their medical history, looking at their mental and physical fitness, an important qualifier for a job that requires decision-making that affects the globe.
At first it seemed like a common-sense proposal, but like many such common-sense proposals, the more I thought about it, the more doubts presented themselves. So I contacted a psychologist of my acquaintance, who replied thusly…
In theory a medical panel for screening the presidential candidates’ health is a good idea. But like all good ideas, I’d be shocked if it yielded what we, as voting Americans, expect it to. Perhaps most importantly, each of us, including the candidates (hopefully) builds a professional relationship with a particular physician(s) or medical team for a reason; knowing a patient’s medical history, being a part of diagnosing and treating that person’s illnesses and injuries over the years, and getting to know that patient’s decision-making and communication style, among other things, gives that physician(s) information and a perspective a medical panel won’t have…unless they include the candidates’ primary physician(s) on the panel. Is an outside perspective or “second opinion” valuable? Of course. It adds to, informs, even challenges the primary physician/team’s perspective. But it shouldn’t replace it, just to satisfy political correctness.
The mental health assessment is particularly vulnerable in the political arena…and in general. There isn’t a blood test for major mental health diagnoses such as schizophrenia, or personality disorders. There are no physiological measures, only question and answer tools. While some of these tools are quite advanced in their construction, and their creators went to great lengths and took great care to measure something useful to the mental health field, when it comes down to it, they are measuring ideas. Mental health struggles are real things, very real things with real consequences. The medical field has ideas about these things. The mental health field tries to measure those ideas – not the mental illness itself. Those ideas are constantly changing as new evidence becomes available, but also as social and cultural ideas change. What used to be a diagnosis is no longer a diagnosis and what was one diagnosis is now four separate diagnoses. What one psychiatrist or psychologist (or your licensed mental health professional of choice) diagnoses as Borderline Personality Disorder, another diagnoses as Bipolar I. There is no definitive test. And because there is no definitive test, accusations – yes, accusations, because that’s what mental health diagnoses will become – will abound. Mental health conditions (again, shaped by our time in history, our culture, and our social mores) will become a mark of incompetence, not a painful condition for which people might need help and which require unfathomable strength and resilience to live with and/or overcome. They will become weapons for excising opponents from the political world, moving our judgment of mental illness back a hundred years.
