A Washington DC psychiatrist and former FBI behavioral consultant argues that the President’s annual physical exam ought to include a mental health checkup.

“Historians tell us that while they were in the White House, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan all suffered from brain disorders. Not one of them appears to have been evaluated by a psychiatrist. If they were, that information was kept from the American public

(…)

My experience tells me that had Lincoln, Roosevelt or Reagan gone through a thorough modern psychiatric exam during certain periods of their presidency, their mental impairments could have been easily and clearly diagnosed, and perhaps even treated. Thanks to advances in psychiatry, we can do better. We all deserve the assurance that our highest elected official is of sound mind, as well as body.” Washington Post [via the Spike Report]

Reminds me of when, during Ronald Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign, I was one of a group of medical interns and residents demonstrating in our white coats at a Boston campaign stop. Singled out for a radio interview about the rationale for our protest, I laid out my concerns about his mental fitness for another term and suggested that he was developing Alzheimer’s disease. Didn’t stop him from being reelected…

Big Bird and Cookie Monster to wed; thanks to the Spike Report for the link. Philadelphia Inquirer

Airport Face Scanner Failed: “Facial recognition technology tested at the Palm Beach International Airport had a dismal failure rate, according to preliminary results from a pilot program at the facility.

The system failed to correctly identify airport employees 53 percent of the time, according to test data that was obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union under Florida’s open records law.” Wired

Hot on the Contrails of Weather — meterological researchers who have long suspected that airplane contrails form large cloud banks that can substantially alter the atmosphere’s heat balance were given a unique opportunity to test the proposition when the FAA imposed a three-day ban on commercial flights after 9-11 — and found that “the American climate was indeed noticeably different” during the interval. Wired

‘Lifters’: An Idea in the Clouds: ‘Antigravitational devices developed by a computer geek could eventually change the world as we know it.

Or they may just blow a few holes into some barn roofs.

The devices are known as “lifters.” When charged with a small amount of electrical power, they levitate, apparently able to resist Earth’s gravitational forces.’ Wired

Alan Stone, distinguished Harvard psychiatrist, considers John Nash and the Hollywood romance with mental illness:

“If I were a Hollywood actor, I would be calling my agent to be on the lookout for roles in which I could play a mentally troubled character. Kathy Bates earned her Oscar playing a madwoman in Misery in 1990; the next year, Anthony Hopkins earned one for the role of cannibal Hannibal Lecter; in 1993 Holly Hunter was the mute heroine of The Piano; 1994 produced Tom Hanks as the strange but winning Forrest Gump; in 1995 there was the alcoholic Nicholas Cage of Leaving Las Vegas; Geoffrey Rush won the Best Actor award for his 1996 performance as schizoaffective pianist David Helfgott; 1997 was Jack Nicholson’s turn for doing obsessive compulsive disorder; James Coburn picked up his Oscar as the sadistic paranoid father in 1998’s Affliction; and in 1999, Michael Caine was a narcotics addict and Angelina Jolie co-starred as the sociopath of Girl, Interrupted. That’s ten Oscars in ten years and I am not counting the borderline cases like Jessica Lange who is half mad in most of her movies and has already collected two Oscars.”

Stone’s comments about the Russell Crowe portrayal (or was it the script?) capture some of the discomforts I felt with the film’s view of schizophrenia, patients with which I work every day, as well:

Life is uglier and more complicated than movies. The screenwriter did find an imaginative way to capture Nash’s claim that he cured himself with reason. There is a moment in the movie when Nash suddenly has the insight that his roommate’s niece never gets older—a logical proof that allows him to recognize that his mind has been playing tricks on him. He is a problem-solver and so he solves this problem slowly—to use his analogy—like an overweight person who sticks to a diet. The other half of his cure—the movie myth that his wife’s love rescued him—is also fiction and the emotional high point of the movie. In an imagined Nobel speech, he is shown speaking to dignitaries gathered from around the world. He explains that he has explored the physical and the metaphysical, logic and reason, but what is real is love, and he learned that from his wife. This Hollywood redemption speech puts the face of humility on Nash’s unyielding egocentricity and arrogance. It brings tears to ones eyes, even when one knows better.

Boston Review

Satire on Patsy Cline Trips Up Columnist NY Times

“Bush warns Pakistan on Kashmir incursions; he says curbing militants more critical than stopping missile tests.” Read to the end of this San Francisco Chronicle piece, which is more about his conduct during a joint press conference with President Chirac than it is about the warning to Musharraf, for ongoing coverage of what a jackass we have for a President (if you still need convincing). He’s unconvincing in attributing his cognitive difficulties this time to jetlag.

Maureen Dowd in the NY Times is also still on his case, of course. This piece echoes my discomfort at how astonishingly rapidly “fighting terrorism” has become a platitude comparable in its emptiness to “fighting Communism” during the Cold War. If your thinking is as unnuanced and cognitively inflexible as Bush’s, you need meaningless stereotypes instead of concepts.

Like Ronald Reagan, W.’s appeal is that he is an All-American who believes what he believes. And he trusted his gut to create a new dynamic with a Russian leader. But such a lack of nuance over the long term could be worrisome. As Murray Kempton said, there is “the evil of lesser evilism.” The Bushes exhibit a moral myopia, thinking anything they do must be virtuous because they see themselves as virtuous.

I would, however, quibble with Dowd’s repeated description of Bush’s reign as a “Manichaean” presidency. Although the term is often applied to anyone who sees things as all black-and-white, good-or-evil, it is only dumb luck that the President’s conceptual limitations superficially echo a sophisticated worldview (and, ironically, one that was considered an anti-Christian heresy…)

Not if but when: “All Sept. 11 did was turn a theoretical possibility into a felt danger. All it did was supply a credible cast of characters who hate us so much they would thrill to the prospect of actually doing it — and, most important in rethinking the probabilities, would be happy to die in the effort. All it did was give our nightmares legs…

The best reason for thinking it won’t happen is that it hasn’t happened yet, and that is terrible logic. The problem is not so much that we are not doing enough to prevent a terrorist from turning our atomic knowledge against us (although we are not). The problem is that there may be no such thing as ‘enough’. ”

The author comprehensively considers the risk of both the detonation of an atomic explosion and the non-explosive dispersal of radioactive matierals by terrorists. Uncharacteristically, he lapses into the first person toward the end of the article:

Fear is personal. My own — in part, because it’s the one I grew up with, the one that made me shiver through the Cuban missile crisis and ”On the Beach” — is the horrible magic of nuclear fission. A dirty bomb or an assault on a nuclear power station, ghastly as that would be, feels to me within the range of what we have survived. As the White House official I spoke with said, it’s basically Oklahoma City plus the Hart Office Building. A nuclear explosion is in a different realm of fears and would test the country in ways we can scarcely imagine.

I share this reaction; it’s the reason, as readers of FmH will recall, that I disapprove of referring to the WTC site as “ground zero,” a term whose connotations properly relate to the site of a nuclear blast. Most people have no idea how unimaginably worse a nuclear detonation in the midst of New York would have been, and we ought not use sexy linguistic hype to obscure that distinction:

As I neared the end of this assignment, I asked Matthew McKinzie, a staff scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, to run a computer model of a one-kiloton nuclear explosion in Times Square, half a block from my office, on a nice spring workday. By the standards of serious nuclear weaponry, one kiloton is a junk bomb, hardly worthy of respect, a fifteenth the power of the bomb over Hiroshima.

A couple of days later he e-mailed me the results, which I combined with estimates of office workers and tourist traffic in the area…

NY Times Magazine