Joe Biden’s Mental Health Is Not A Concern, Experts Say, Claiming That President Trump’s Very Much Is

Joe Biden‘s mental state does not concern a team of mental health professionals, Yahoo News reports. However, that same group of mental health professionals is extremely concerned about President Donald Trump’s purportedly-declining mental faculties.

The former vice president’s resurgence in the primary season has also brought a focus on his tendency to produce verbal gaffes, like tripping over his words or sharing stories of memories during which he messes up key facts. For example, he has claimed that he was arrested in South Africa, when in fact he was only briefly detained at an airport.

So are these gaffes evidence of the declining mental faculties of an aged man (Biden is 77 years old)? And if so, how do they compare to Donald Trump’s own mental presentation?

There’s no comparison, says Bandy Lee, a Yale School of Medicine psychiatrist.

“A few stumbled words are not the same as the extreme danger that results from a list of signs that Donald Trump has shown,” Lee said.

In fact, Lee has even taken the unusual step of doing something of a remote armchair diagnosis of the former Vice President, something she admits is not considered a best practice in her field.

Writing in Medium, Lee gave her report on Biden while using the disclaimer that she generally doesn’t diagnose a person without conducting an examination in person. The exception is when “there is evidence of such profound danger to public health and well-being because of serious signs of mental instability in a public servant.”

In fact, much of Dr. Lee’s report is a comparison of the severity of Biden’s blunders compared to Trump’s behavior.

“Joe Biden does not nearly meet my threshold for signs of dangerous mental instability… Biden should not even come up if we cannot address the catastrophic dangers of Donald Trump, whose mental impairments are presently costing lives, tangibly and quantifiably, through his mishandling of the most serious epidemic in recent years,” she says.

Dr. Lee is not alone in believing that Donald Trump’s presentation is cause for serious concern about his mental health.

Psychologist Lynne Meyer also says that Biden‘s tendency to sometimes have difficulty expressing himself is not the same as the wholesale disconnect with reality evident with Donald Trump.

“[Biden] digresses and gets tangential, that’s not cognitive decline… Trump’s cognitive decline or problems are that he doesn’t even seem to have [any] comprehension of reality. That’s what it looks like,” Meyer said.

Biden, for his part, has released documents related to his medical condition, revealing that his blood pressure and cholesterol are perfectly normal. He has not released any documents related to his mental or neurological health.