Thompson is not much of a diagnostician, and he legitimizes alot of his psychiatric namecalling by invoking the deprecated psychoanalyst Justin Frank, author of Bush on the Couch, who many of us feel violated an ethical canon of the field by diagnosing sight unseen (although I feel the the potential impact of the President’s mental stability or lack thereof on every living soul on the planet makes him fair game in a different way even than other public figures whose behavior is under scrutiny). Thompson’s other claim to the authority to bandy about the labels is his own status as a recovering alcoholic with 11 years sobriety. (“I know all too well the symptoms that Dr. Frank describes and, after watching Bush for the past several years, I have to, unfortunately, agree with him.”) Diagnostic acumen apart, if Bush’s behavior is really as Thompson’s putative White House sources describe it, we had better hope he is being attended to by a good psychopharmacologist. Not that we would ever know, since evidence bearing on the President’s mental health is a state secret, unlike the public status of the results of his annual physical. I would argue that the public has even more of an abiding interest in knowing about the President’s mental health than his physical, and that, if there is not, there ought to be some sort of periodic checkup in this sphere as well, the results being made public. (Bush’s own white paper on reforming the mental health delivery system in the United States, which I read in detail and wrote about in FmH last year, comes close to suggesting a mandatory annual mental health checkup for every citizen, in the interpretation of some, by the way…) Of course, someone as beady-eyed, petty and defensive as Dubya (and, uhh, that’s no psychiatric diagnosis, in case you were wondering) would take exception to such a requirement and fire any White House mental health professional who took their job responsibilities too seriously.