Regrettably, there is no constitutional “procedure for dealing with nuts.”

Alex Thompson writes in Politico,

Political taboos, campaign dealbreakers and electoral glass ceilings are crumbling. Members of Congress are openly gay and bisexual, there’s a black man in the White House, and a woman may be next. Voters have accepted all sorts of behavioral warts and missteps in their political candidates, too. DUIs? A mistake of their youth. Draft dodgers? There’s a long list. Womanizers? A much longer list. Illegal drugs? In just a few short elections, we’ve gone from a president who “didn’t inhale” to one who openly admits using cocaine in his youth.

Yet one large taboo remains stubbornly fixed—mental illness. Sure, it’s part of the conversation, in that pundits these days can, and do, speculate casually about whether Donald Trump has narcissistic personality disorder, Joe Biden has slid into depression, Hillary Clinton is clinically paranoid or Jeb Bush will be undone by a Freudian sibling tangle. But here’s the really sick thing: For a politician to admit to seeing a psychiatrist would likely be far more politically damaging than any of the possible symptoms of actual mental illness.

For a president or a candidate, it’s the “kiss of death,” says Burton Lee, George H.W. Bush’s presidential physician. It would “create a crisis of confidence” in the country, says David Axelrod, former senior adviser to President Barack Obama. “I’d like to believe I’m wrong,” he adds, but a commander in chief who disclosed a mental illness would face an almost insurmountable political problem: “Every time he said a cross word or expressed frustration, people would say, ‘He’s having one of those days.’” Instead, Axelrod wryly notes, “We just watch their hair turn gray.”

More than 40 years have passed since Thomas Eagleton, the 1972 Democratic vice presidential candidate, withdrew from the race after revealing that he had been hospitalized for depression. Since that political firestorm, the issue has remained firmly off-limits: No Democratic or Republican nominee running for president or vice president has disclosed mental illness or treatment for it ever since—to do so would be politically incurable. And as recently as the last election cycle, congressional and state-level campaigns were digging up past psychiatric treatment to bludgeon their opponents.

...Nixon and John F. Kennedy clandestinely filled their medicine cabinets with psychotropic drugs, recently uncovered documents reveal. In fact, Kennedy aide and historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. suggested in his journals that several modern presidents were mentally unbalanced; he recorded top aides arguing whether President Lyndon Johnson was clinically paranoid or a manic-depressive, and fretted that there was no constitutional “procedure for dealing with nuts.”

...Which raises the question: When roughly a fifth of American adults use medication and millions go to talk therapy for their mental health, why shouldn’t the people governing the country be able to as well?

...In the White House, Axelrod says, “The pressures are beyond anything that human beings are designed to handle.”

...Abraham Lincoln was famously melancholy, experiencing periods of such deep depression throughout his lifetime that he contemplated suicide and spent weeks at a time bedridden. The future president even tried the 19th-century version of an antidepressant: “blue mass” pills that, unfortunately for Lincoln, were a poisonous combination of ground mercury, rosewater and honey. (“The opposition researchers of today would have been very eager to discover Lincoln’s propensity for depression,” says presidential historian Michael Beschloss. “If they had, we might have lost perhaps our greatest president.”)

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