According to Ddr. Bandy Lee, mental health experts have been claiming that Donald Trump shows symptoms of mental illness for years, and now — in a column written for Raw Story — she has said that these symptoms spread to the 48 percent of voters who cast their ballot for him. Lee suggested, while many people made a political decision to vote for the president, for others, the issue was the result of mental health issues.
According to Lee,when people are mentally impaired, the “primitive brain” takes over, which prompts them to be motivated solely by an instinct to survive. The disordered mind will do anything to survive, including “annihilate himself and the world,” as the report suggested of Trump.
Lee went on to assert that Trump has been carefully crafting his behavior to capitalize on the mood of the country and to appeal to his followers’ survival instincts. As a result, his followers are incredibly invested in preventing his downfall.
Lee claimed that because of their personal histories, Trump supporters, “are thus vulnerable to someone manipulative and exploitative enough to say he will take care of them and protect them in unrealistic ways that defy reality.”
Once his followers placed their trust in Trump, they often gave up their “agency and rationality,” according to Lee.
Lee analogized Trump supporters to abuse victims, in that abused children can blame themselves rather than their abusive parents because they need them for survival and are driven to believe that their caregiver can do no wrong. She asserted that Trump supporters have developed this kind of bond with the president.
“Under these emotional bonds, his followers will likely experience any threat to his position as an existential threat to themselves, which is why negative facts about him only activate defensive denial and disavowal, rather than abandonment,” the piece said.
The author pointed to recent chants at a Trump rally calling for Dr. Anthony Fauci to be fired, as The Inquisitr previously reported, as an indication of the fact that his followers align with his views and pathologies whether or not they align with reality.
According to Lee, the phenomenon is similar to a well-documented pathology known as shared psychosis. When the leader stops being in contact with his followers, the effect tends to go away, which is apparently why Trump holds frequent rallies and in-person events.
For this reason, Lee posited, experts argued that Trump must be removed from office, whether that is ultimately decided through the vote or via other methods, though they declined to specify what those methods might be.