Psychologists struggle to comprehend the incomprehensible (Donald Trump)

A friend of a friend is a Ph.D. psychologist…

I had to take a class yesterday on “Racial and Community Violence” in order to renew my license to practice. There were only three articles used as curric[ulum].

(1) The first was regarding the mystery of why ordinary Americans support Trump. It said among other things, “Trump is an insult clown….and he is “A gold-plated buffoon who draws the enthusiastic endorsement of racists across the spectrum of intolerance, a gorgeous mosaic of haters, each of them quivering excitedly at the prospect of keeping a real, honest-to-god bigot in the White House. The Trump movement is a one-note phenomenon, a vast surge of race-hate. Its partisans are not only incomprehensible, they are not really worth comprehending.” (maybe from The Guardian?)

The second article was titled “Ferguson Isn’t about Black Rage Against Cops. It’s About White Rage Against Progress.” (Washington Post?)

The last article was titled, “The Decline and Fall of White America: Inside the Study that Shocked the Public-Health Community” (Slate?)

I got my CEUs [continuing education units?]. The class was produced and offered by The American Psychological Association. I paid them $80 for it. It is 3 hours to meet my multicultural requirement.

12 thoughts on “Psychologists struggle to comprehend the incomprehensible (Donald Trump)

  1. The lion kingdom’s old man is a psychologist & very pro Trump, thinking democrats have some kind of mental health problems. You didn’t say if the friend of the friend was a Trump supporter or whether the employee at the American Psychological Association who devised the class was a PhD psychologist.

  2. “bigot” is only used as an insult because it sounds like a nasty word, and most people don’t know its actual definition. Webster’s Dictionary 1988 defines it as: “one who blindly or intolerantly holds an creed or opinion”. Doesn’t that cover the majority of people, especially those on the left? Doesn’t their raging intolerance of Trump and his supporters make them textbook bigots?

  3. Well, WHERE should I begin? I could write a few thousand words about this but it would bore the crap out of everyone, and I’d be very likely to paint with an awfully broad brush and unfairly insult the small number of actually competent psychologists out there, so I’ll just say:

    Whenever I learn that a new acquaintance is a psychologist, the first thing I do during chitchat mode is steer the conversation to something I just heard in the past week or so on NPR. You know, something about the protests in Portland and how terrible it is that Trump sent federal troops there, or some clever commentary on how immigrants are finding their ways through Trump’s evil and racist immigration crackdowns with the help of various righteous organizations who help them get in, stuff I heard on All Things Considered, etc. It’s great, because when you say: “Yeah, and all that is why I voted for him” and watch as their faces contort and they have to figure out what kind of deviant racist subhuman they’re dealing with, it’s just priceless.

  4. Does the lucky psychologist by any chance still have access to the class? Was it online? Was the curriculum sent to him by email? It would be truly educational for all of us if we could see some screenshots and/or the original text of the curriculum: specifically, it would be important to have the titles of those articles together with the statement that the course was produced by the APA. I happen to know that there are some people in this country who at one point in their lives decided that they personally enjoyed the letters JD more than PhD after their names and I would be willing to share those screenshots/curriculum with them to see if something even more education might come out of that class.

    • Hmm. This is interesting. Most of the APA online course materials come with rather strict licensing agreements that are very limited and nontransferable. They offer three types of CE courses:

      https://www.apa.org/education/ce/independent-study-terms

      See the “Video on Demand” terms for reference.

      Pricing of the courses by credit seems a little erratic, but this sounds like it would be a 3 or 4 credit course depending on how it was paid for (either list price or Member/Affiliate, which is cheaper), assuming it’s a video/online course. I haven’t looked through all their Book/Article based courses.

      If you Google “Racial and Community Violence APA” you get this online course, which is indeed $80, but the description doesn’t mention these articles explicitly. That doesn’t mean they’re not mentioned in the slides/course materials, but this could be the wrong one.

      https://www.apa.org/education/ce/ccw0056

      It was first webcast in March, 2016. All of the articles mentioned at the top were published either in March of 2016 or prior.

      I don’t have a JD after my name but I’d also be very interested to find out if one of their CE courses included reading those articles.

    • Although I can’t find a course with that specific title, it wouldn’t surprise or shock me at all if a course featuring those reading materials exists, or if psychologists just like to read them on their own and draw their own conclusions. The APA is heavy into SJW, and we’re living in an intersectional world. Of course, psychologists have been diagnosing Trump for a long time, beginning in a quasi-organized way with John Gartner from Baltimore (formerly taught at Johns Hopkins), who argued that their “Goldwater rule” against diagnosing public figures whom they’ve never personally examined doesn’t apply to Trump:

      https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/brainstorm/201701/shrinks-battle-over-diagnosing-donald-trump?page=1

      Recently, Gartner has called him “most successful bio-terrorist in human history” and a “first degree mass-murderer.” It wouldn’t surprise me at all if he thinks Trump’s supporters are racists, in addition to aiding and abetting mass murder, because he thinks they’re members of a “political death cult.”

      https://www.salon.com/2020/07/13/dr-john-gartner-donald-trump-is-the-most-successful-bio-terrorist-in-human-history/

      So compared to Gartner’s opinion, this course would be comparatively tame.

  5. Well, the “land of free” is becoming Maoist brainwashing camp.
    But it also creates lots of jobs.
    What would otherwise all those highly educated grievance experts do?

  6. A psychiatrist rented a boat slip across the floating dock from me, had a nice 35 ft sailboat. He was completely incompetent and acted insane. The slip had used tires alongside, and he used them for brakes, never once got the boat stopped without overrunning the tires, often by 6 feet or more. Never saw him alone or sober, always hammered and the loud music never stopped. I cannot imagine taking his advice on anything. Presume he did not expect to meet any patients while yachting.

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