Public office should no more prevent a President from seeking psychotherapy than it should prevent him from seeking chemotherapy. And the Clintons, of all people, should know that better than anyone—they've made mental-health care a political cause. In the 1992 campaign they joined with Al and Tipper Gore to court boomers by talking openly of their past experiences with family counseling, occasioned by the drug bust of Mr. Clinton's half-brother and the hospitalization of the Gores' son after he was hit by a car. "By not confronting problems early," Mr. Clinton said all too prophetically at that time, "you end up making things worse."Similarly—and just two months ago—the Clintons and the Gores held a full-day White House Conference on Mental Health. The supposed point of that event, they said, was to counter the myths of mental illness, thereby encouraging the frightened or embarrassed to seek help. "Mental illness is nothing to be ashamed of, but stigma and bias shame us all," said Mr. Clinton in a radio address. If mental illness is left untreated, he said at the conference, "the loss of human potential is staggering."
For all his lofty preaching to the rest of us, perhaps it was fear of just such bias that explains (but does not excuse) his inability to seek treatment for his own condition, even at the cost of putting himself and everyone around him through hell. Perhaps he felt that while a sports hero like Mark McGwire of a TV news star like Mike Wallace or even the country's most popular fictional Mafia boss, Tony Soprano, can flourish after going public with their mental-health histories, such revelations still condemn a chief executive to charges of weakness. But isn't it weaker to let one's emotional problems metastasize rather than address them? What does it say about our culture that it may be easier for a President to live down having oral sex with an intern in the Oval Office than having oral discourse in a doctor's office? ...
The more obfuscation and fear that surround mental illnesses of all types and their treatment, the less hope we have of ameliorating public policy and prejudices that leave these illnesses undertreated, untreated and mistreated. At the gravest end of the mental-health spectrum, this failure produces catastrophes that are fast becoming a fixture of the evening news.
In the aftermath of Columbine, no one stated our predicament more acutely than Dr. W. Walter Menninger, of the famed clinic bearing his family's name in Topeka, Kansas. Speaking to the American Psychiatric Association in Washington, he pinpointed the national hypocrisy: "We recognize incidents of mental illness, and at the same time we stigmatize people who suffer from it or seek help to deal with it. We say 'seek treatment,' but at the same time we limit access, and availability, and insurance to pay for it, and in the end make it more difficult to get treatment. There is a disconnectedness between what we say we need as a society and what we do as a society."
The results of this schism between words and actions, and the piecemeal mental-health system it leads to, cut across all demographic and cultural lines. As the White House sex farce was preventable, so, conceivably, was the tragic rampage of this week's shooter, the latest human time bomb who appears to have entered that so-called system only to fall through its cracks.
[Ed.: Not long into Clinton's first term of office, Edith Efron wrote a prescient article in Reason asserting that the president was literally dysfunctional, suffering from a cognitive disorder preventing him from acting on a set of fixed priorities.]
