So we have the psychiatrist and psychologist groups saying don’t comment on a public figure’s mental health and the psychoanalytic group saying be very careful if you comment. But those are official policies, and individual opinions differ widely. Some mental health professionals have defended the Goldwater rule, including Allen Frances, who helped write one edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a book so influential that it’s sometimes referred to as the Bible of mental health disorders. “Bad behavior is rarely a sign of mental illness, and the mentally ill behave badly only rarely,” Frances wrote in The New York Times. “Psychiatric name-calling is a misguided way of countering Mr. Trump’s attack on democracy.”

Other mental health professionals have spoken out on what Yale psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee has called psychiatrists’ “Duty to Warn” when a leader is dangerous to the health and security of their patients. (The term comes from laws that allow or in some cases compel psychiatrists to break confidentiality rules to alert police or potential victims when a patient poses an imminent danger to someone.)5 Leonard L. Glass, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School resigned from the American Psychiatric Association in protest of the Goldwater rule, writing in The Boston Globe that it was “inappropriate for the APA to assert that I would be in violation of my profession’s ethics code if I continued to speak out in what I consider a thoughtful, data-driven, and responsible fashion regarding Trump or any other public figure.”