On madness – Andrew Preston in TLS:

‘Shortly after the US election of 2016 a group of psychiatrists denounced Donald Trump as a psychologically unbalanced sociopath – cruel, narcissistic, paranoid, prone to delusions of grandeur – and thus a danger to the world. But in doing so they had to wrestle with two contradictory principles of their profession: a psychiatrist shouldn’t offer diagnoses for people they have never met, let alone treated, a principle also known, thanks to an earlier American political episode, as the Goldwater rule; yet a psychiatrist also has a duty, not only moral but legal, to warn if someone’s mental illness poses a danger to others. This seemed compelling in Trump’s case, but in publicly offering a diagnosis, their decision to prioritize the second principle over the first generated fierce debate over whether a president’s state of mind was fair game.
Most observers agreed it was. During the Trump era sensational revelations of a psychologically unstable president made Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury one of the fastest-selling books in publishing history. As Nancy Pelosi put it, “You understand that this is not a person of sound mind”. In response, Trump’s self-diagnosis will long be remembered: he wasn’t just “smart, but genius … and a very stable genius at that!”’

(…)

‘Who was to blame? Historians have argued ever since, but one standout interpretation came in 1966 with the publication of a Wilson psychobiography co-authored by the former US diplomat William Bullitt and (posthumously) none other than Sigmund Freud. Bullitt was one of the negotiators in Paris before becoming disillusioned with Wilson’s obstinance and publicly breaking with him; Freud had been Bullitt’s therapist. Using psychoanalysis – naturally, it all came down to Wilson’s domineering father – Bullitt and Freud concluded that Wilsonianism’s failure was the result of the president’s mental fragility, personal grandiosity and temperamental inability to compromise.’

(…)

‘There’s no doubt that Wilson made many mistakes, and that the League of Nations failed in large part because of them. But political mistakes aren’t themselves a sign of psychological illness, even if it sometimes seems that way to the rest of us. Franklin Roosevelt’s debacle over the Supreme Court in 1937, Johnson’s disaster in Vietnam, George W. Bush’s catastrophe in Iraq: the list of presidential calamity is long. This doesn’t excuse bad decisions, but it does illustrate that insanity isn’t a necessary precondition for bad judgement or hubris. Many of Wilson’s errors were byproducts of a stroke that he suffered during the most intense stage of the League debate, but before then his mistakes were simply rational miscalculations of circumstance and evidence.’ (…)

‘Most presidents have displayed strange or antisocial behaviour. Perhaps that’s because they’ve all to some extent been mentally ill: who other than a narcissist would even want the job? Others may have had the sense not to say it out loud, but Trump wasn’t the only president to believe “I alone can fix it”. Maybe Wilson and Nixon were indeed mad. But if so, they probably all were.’

Read the review here.

There are just different shades of madness.

The medicalization of everything that is deemed undesirable has not done much for society nor for the people who are labeled ‘patients.’ Perhaps you must be mad if you want to be president, probably you must be mad if you want to be a politician.
Madness as conscious or unconscious survival strategy seems to be convincing. To stay alive is madness.

And a world without madness would not only be boring, but also a world without art and religion. At the same time, romanticizing madness is as shortsighted as calling the enemy a madman.