Reflections on the Goldwater Rule

The Pennsylvania Psychologist, 83, 9, p. 18-19. , 2023

Many psychologists feel that we have a duty to warn about potentially dangerous leaders. As important as assessing political candidates is, it is not a good idea to give in-person assessments to political candidates. Candidates for office are often experts in selling a manufactured image. However, it is possible to evaluate political candidates' personalities based on their documented statements and recorded observed behaviors. Scientific research supports the validity of experts rating politicians' personality traits regarding leadership quality. There is a myth that psychologists cannot offer a professional opinion about a person's mental functioning without having met them. This started with what is known as the " Goldwater Rule" which only applies to psychiatrists and no other mental health professionals. We psychologists have a duty to warn about dangerousness, but we must use evidence-based methods that are consistent with APA's Ethical Standard 9.01. History informs us that the malignant mental illness of autocratic leaders causes the worst avoidable suffering. For example, in just 43 years, from 1933-1976 an estimated 120,000,000 people died due to the leaderships of only three men: Hitler, Stalin, and Mao Zedong.

Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, 2017

When, if ever, should psychological scientists be permitted to offer professional opinions concerning the mental health of public figures they have never directly examined? This contentious question, which attracted widespread public attention during the 1964 U.S. presidential election involving Barry Goldwater, received renewed scrutiny during and after the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, when many mental health professionals raised pointed questions concerning the psychiatric status of Donald Trump. Although the Goldwater Rule prohibits psychiatrists from offering diagnostic opinions on individuals they have never examined, no comparable rule exists for psychologists. We contend that, owing largely to the Goldwater Rule's origins in psychiatry, a substantial body of psychological research on assessment and clinical judgment, including work on the questionable validity of unstructured interviews, the psychology of cognitive biases, and the validity of informant reports and of ...

Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 2020

Since the contentious 2016 presidential election and the election of a controversial president, considerable attention has been paid to the behavior and attitudes of the president, including many questions about his mental stability. Psychiatrists wonder what contribution they might make to the public discourse or what they might be permitted to responsibly and ethically say in light of the American Psychiatric Association ethics annotation that has come to be known (misconstrued) as “the Goldwater Rule.” The first thing to appreciate about the so-called Goldwater rule is that it is not a rule, but rather a principle.

The journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, 2016

Section 7.3 of the code of ethics of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) cautions psychiatrists against making public statements about public figures whom they have not formally evaluated. The APA's concern is to safeguard the public perception of psychiatry as a scientific and credible profession. The ethic is that diagnostic terminology and theory should not be used for speculative or ad hominem attacks that promote the interests of the individual physician or for political and ideological causes. However, the Goldwater Rule presents conflicting problems. These include the right to speak one's conscience regarding concerns about the psychological stability of high office holders and competing considerations regarding one's role as a private citizen versus that as a professional figure. Furthermore, the APA's proscription on diagnosis without formal interview can be questioned, since third-party payers, expert witnesses in law cases, and historical psychobiog...

Psychiatric Bulletin, 1997

Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 1980

Medical History, 2011

American psychiatry on the eve of Pearl Harbor was a small, stigmatised, and isolated specialty, for the most part confined as surely inside the high walls of its barrack-asylums as the patients over whom it exercised near-autocratic powers. The number of mentally ill patients incarcerated in state and county mental hospitals had grown sharply, from 150,000 at the turn of the century to 445,000 in 1940. The fiscal crisis of the states that accompanied the Great Depression had produced a steady deterioration of conditions in these institutions, a deterioration that would intensify as a result of the exigencies of total war. In the immediate aftermath of that prolonged conflict, conditions had degenerated to such a parlous state that a number of outside observers compared America's asylums to Nazi death camps.

Schizophrenia Bulletin, 2010

The use of psychiatry for political purposes has been a major subject of debate within the world psychiatric community during the second half of the 20th century. The issue became prominent in the 1970s and 1980s due to the systematic political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union, where approximately one-third of the political prisoners were locked up in psychiatric hospitals. The issue caused a major rift within the World Psychiatric Association, from which the Soviets were forced to withdraw in 1983. They returned conditionally in 1989. Political abuse of psychiatry took also place in other socialist countries and on a systematic scale in Romania, and during the first decade of the 21st century, it became clear that systematic political abuse of psychiatry is also happening in the People's Republic of China. The article discusses the historical background to these abuses and concludes that the issue had a major impact on the development of concepts regarding medical ethics and the professional responsibility of physicians.

Ethics, Medicine and Public Health, 2015

In October 1989, the General Assembly of the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) accepted the Soviet psychiatric association back conditionally, after having been forced to leave the organization six years earlier because of systematic abuse of psychiatry for political purposes. Three weeks later, the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, and in 1991, the Soviet Union itself ceased to exist. However, over the past years, an increasing number of reports on the internment of political activists in former Soviet republics made people realize that 25 years after the decision of the WPA, political abuse of psychiatry still has not been eradicated. Using psychiatry as a means of repression has been a particular favorite of totalitarian regimes with a communist State ideology. Cases have been reported from other countries as well, including Western democratic societies, yet nowhere else has it been developed into a systematic method of repression. While probably the overwhelming majority of Soviet psychiatrists were unaware that they had become part of a perfidious system to treat dissenters as psychiatrically ill on the orders of the Party and the KGB, there is also ample evidence that the core group of architects of the system knew very well what they were doing. When the USSR disintegrated, the practice of using psychiatry against political opponents virtually ceased to exist. What came in its place, however, was a very disturbing collection of other forms of abuses, including human rights abuses due to lack of resources, outdated methods of treatment, lack of understanding of human individual rights and a growing lack of tolerance in society. Starting this century, the number of individual cases of political abuse of psychiatry has increased, in particular, over the past few years in Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan. The issue of Soviet political abuse of psychiatry had a lasting impact on world psychiatry. It triggered the discussions on medical ethics and the

Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 2003

American psychiatrists and psychologists have long been close colleagues and fierce rivals. There is no better illustration of this polarized relationship than the chronic tug-of-war over psychotherapy. Both groups laid claim to psychotherapy-whatever it was and however it was practiced. Psychiatrists attempted to monopolize psychotherapy despite its ambiguous status as an essential component of the healing arts. After the war, psychologists pressed for a share on the basis of their qualifications and competence, but struggled to overcome the limitations imposed by medical envy. This story lays bare the crucial function of tools and techniques for defining the identity and the boundaries of a sciencebased profession.