New book stokes furor over Biden’s mental decline, but news of Trump’s decline continues to be sidelined

Commentators are extending their condolences to Biden and his family and then quickly returning to a discussion of the book. Tapper told Newsweek: “The news media is in a crisis…Reporters in general, CNN, NPR, ABC, CBS, all of us, people don’t trust us. One of the reasons they don’t trust us is what just happened with Joe Biden and his acuity and the fact that we in the media were pretty late to the story.”

Largely lost in the conversation so far is a bigger question: why there is no test for mental fitness for the presidency, unlike many other jobs that don’t involve access to nuclear codes. The press has done little consistent reporting on that issue — or on Trump’s lack of mental acuity. Psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee, a former Yale professor and editor of “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” has noted that U.S. commanders-in-chief “are not put to the same test,” as American military personnel who must pass a ‘fitness for duty’ test before they serve. Those handling nuclear weapons must undergo a more rigorous screening yearly. Failure to require these tests of the U.S. president is a serious omission that needs to be corrected, Lee says.

In a recent interview with Mindsite News, Lee said that a World Mental Health Coalition petition signed by 50 of the most prominent dementia specialists, forensic psychiatrists and experts in neuropsychiatry found Trump is exhibiting signs of serious cognitive decline. Equally concerning, she noted, is his psychopathology. In June 2024, a panel of expert psychiatrists conducted a dangerousness risk assessment using a widely accepted psychopathy checklist and concluded Trump was highly dangerous. 

“A score of 30 out of 40 indicates dangerous levels of psychopathy, and he scored 36,” Lee said. “This means he has dangerous levels of symptoms such as glibness and superficiality, an exaggerated sense of self-worth, low frustration tolerance, pathological lying, lack of remorse, lack of empathy, a parasitic lifestyle, impulsivity, irresponsible behavior, and failure to accept responsibility for his own actions.” Such dangerousness, she says, ought to make one “automatically unfit for the presidency.” 

The real “original sin,” she says, was the stance taken by the American Psychiatric Association to discredit the work of Lee and other mental health professionals’ warning about Trump’s mental fitness.

– Diana Hembree

Related: “The Press Has Sanewashed Trump’s Dementia and Mental Illness”: An Interview with Dr. John Gartner. MindSite News. April 1, 2025.

With community support, one man has built a thriving life – despite the voices in his head

For years, Arvind Sooknanan’s mental illness upended his life. He was hospitalized 20 times before turning 20, and has had stints of difficult homelessness and involuntary hospitalization. Schizoaffective disorder, which Sooknanan has been living with for years, is characterized by the hallucinations and delusions of schizophrenia with severe manic or depressive mood episodes. The voices he hears haven’t gone away, he told the New York Times, but community helps him weather his episodes, and he hasn’t been involuntarily admitted to hospital since 2020.

Much of that support comes through Fountain House, a multifaceted mental health nonprofit for people with serious mental illness. The organization is known for its holistic clubhouse model – relying heavily on peer support – and now Sooknanan is lobbying for wider adoption. Acknowledging that serious mental illness impacts every area of a person’s life, including personal relationships, employment, education, and housing stability, Fountain House treats those issues – empowering members to provide much of the club’s facilities and programming. They’re treated as competent and responsible. On Sooknanan’s first day at Fountain House, for instance, the executive director handed him $20 to make photocopies of his enrollment docs, trusting him to do so and return with the change. The gesture left him astounded.

“If you know anything about New York City and the Bronx, especially the South Bronx, you’d definitely not give a stranger $20 and expect them to come back with change,” he said. “Much less someone with serious mental illness. When you’re in a psych ward, they wouldn’t even trust you with a toothbrush by yourself.” That gesture, he says, “really transformed my life from that moment on.” 

Fountain House helped Sooknanan return to study at Lehman College, where he was taught by Jenifer Rajkumar. He was open about his diagnosis, which did affect his attendance, but he still managed great grades. Rajkumar asked him to help with some of her work as state director of immigration affairs. She said he was “extraordinary,” and was so impressed that she asked him to manage her 2020 campaign for the State Assembly, when he was just 21 – a campaign they won, making her the first South Asian woman elected to that legislature. 

Now, Sooknanan is onFountain House’s board of directors, and is a senior campaign adviser for Rajkumar’s campaign for public advocate of New York City. He continues to live with hallucinations and manic episodes, but recognizes them as a part of his life. “I started accepting that I was going to have manic episodes, psychotic episodes. And I’m going to feel down, I am going to hear voices. And that’s OK,” he said. “I will still be able to live life. I’ll still be able to achieve whatever goals I set out to achieve.”

National Housing Day 2025 calls for “housing first”

Yesterday, in more than a dozen cities across the US, housing advocates led rallies, facilitated educational workshops, conducted community canvassing, and even released a mini-series – all in service of safe, accessible, affordable and equitably-distributed housing. Housing insecurity’s toll on mental health is clear from research, but it’s particularly vivid in individual accounts. 

“It’s terrible,” Henry North told Shelterforce. A resident of Albany, New York, he’s often without a safe place to sleep and uses a wheelchair. “You don’t know where you’re gonna lay your head without getting mugged or put in jail, and then, well, hell, you go out and do a crime so you can go to jail and have a cell to sleep in; three hots and a cot.” Richard Johnson, another resident of Albany and an organizer with the National Union of the Homeless, said he’s recently had to turn to couch surfing, after a shelter asked for 90% of his disability check if he wanted to stay there.

“Homelessness is not only a deprivation of shelter,” said Unai Montes-Irueste, Media Strategy Director at the People’s Action Institute in Southern California. “It is a deprivation of security.” He also noted the “mental and physical health declines” that many forced into homelessness struggle with, triggered by ”unrelenting stress, harassment, and exposure to violence.” 

But the flip side is that housing-first solutions can make a huge difference, and the evidence to support those strategies is overwhelming. He pointed to research from the National Low Income Housing Coalition and news reports of successful efforts to reduce homelessness in areas including Houston, in part with the support of rent subsidies. Montes-Irueste said it’s clear that “to see solutions at scale for the epidemic of homelessness,” we need more housing-first solutions, not fewer. Fewer is what the Trump administration’s proposed budget cuts are aiming for – something that would devastate the nation, putting 9 million more Americans at risk of homelessness.

Also, check out this reel called “The Land,” which talks about an upcoming Instagram mini-series from the Detroit People’s Platform about the fight “ for housing that is accessible, permanently affordable, and fairly governed by the people who live there.”  

In other news…

How loneliness can breed authoritarianism: Americans are lonelier than they’ve been in decades. Face-to-face socializing among American men fell 30% from 2003 from 2022 – for teens, that figure is a whopping 45%. It’s estimated that 12% of Americans have no close friends, four times the equivalent figure from 1990. In a guest column for Scientific American, Kim Samuel argues that this is not just a public health crisis, but a threat to our democracy. To do so, she draws on the work of  German-Jewish political philosopher Hannah Arendt, who lived through (and escaped) the Holocaust, and whose writing on authoritarianism seems, sadly, more pertinent than ever. 

“Loneliness happens when there are no shared objective facts and no potential collective action to solve shared challenges,” Saumel writes. “It’s a state of being where you can’t trust others. Loneliness, in Arendt’s telling, inflames the connective tissues of a society. It weakens the body politic so that demagogues and despots can prey.” 

Breathing your way to a healthier mind and body: Breathwork is so helpful, ya’ll. Research has repeatedly confirmed that, but I’m tossing in my own personal testimony. As a person who has struggled with serious mental illness most of my adult life, being intentional about my breath has helped me regulate my mood and prevent would-be breakdowns. It’s also known to support better sleep and reduce migraine frequency and muscle tension. Part of the science behind that suggests that it even has a positive effect on your internal body chemistry. 

“When you slow your breathing and gently take in less air, carbon dioxide levels in the lungs and blood rise slightly,” said Patrick McKeown, researcher and author of The Breathing Cure: Develop New Habits for a Healthier, Happier, and Longer Life. That’s good, he added, speaking to National Geographic. Carbon dioxide is a waste gas, sure, but if it’s held in a little longer, it “acts as a natural vasodilator by opening up blood vessels and allowing more oxygen-rich blood to reach the brain and the heart.” That bodes well for our cognitive, physical, and mental health. 

Beware of taking supplements to treat your mental health without the support of a licensed professional. In this personal essay published by The Cut, one woman describes how her fear of psychiatric pharmaceuticals led her to self-prescribe a regimen of St. John’s wort for low mood. An abrupt end to that bottle prompted a mental health crisis that she had to turn to conventional medicine to cure. Now, largely out of that low, she still sometimes feels the allure of supplements. When she does, she tells her therapist, who asks: “Don’t you already feel good? And if you don’t, why don’t you want something that’ll actually work?”