"The WH leaks like a sieve and if there was an actual drug/alcohol problem, it would have been known years ago."
That's a good point. If it were true, I would expect it to have come out now.

Your gut feeling, eh? Well, then. In that case, who needs any of those pesky 'facts' and 'evidence'.

As for voting for Anyone But Trump, I am unfamiliar with him. What party is he running under? What are his tax, social, and foreign policies? Where is his website, so that we can learn more about him?

You can read minds?!?

Cool!!!

I'm thinking of a number. What is it?

Your disbelief and false gut feelings are the very fabric the I-Hate-Trump fake news is composed of. The WH leaks like a sieve and if there was an actual drug/alcohol problem, it would have been known years ago. Nobody can hide it that long, especially someone constantly harassed with teams of haters who wish to destroy him any way possible.

In my experience, people in my life who claim to be teetotalers really are.

"we cannot observe directly whether someone's mind is malfunctioning."
I agree wholeheartedly that it's wrong and dehumanizing to dismiss someone's ideas as an illness. I also agree with what your idea (if I understand right) that there is real mental illness and it involves cases where in ability to communicate, depression, or hallucinations make it impossible for someone to function. I further agree that even in those cases, it would be hard to trust them to evaluate a president, when there are obvious risks for political bias.

All that being said, my gut feeling is that President Trump has some sort of addiction or mental illness. I don't see techniques and tactics. I see a troubled person who spouts random nonsense that gets a reaction. I suspect he can't support himself, and he's living on an in an inheritance and being propped up (compensating for his disability or "enabling" him) by those around him. I certainly don't know that. I'm a non-expert judging from his public persona. So it's a wild guess. I don't think my guess should deligitimize him. I would urge people to look at his public persona and vote for anyone but him in the next election.

"Trump doesn't drink or use drugs."
I know; he's a rare guy in the reality TV, marketing, and NYC RE world who is a teetotaler. I do not believe it. I have no evidence. To Your_Name_Goes_Here's point, I'm no expert on drinking, beyond being from the hardest drinking state in the country. In my experience, some of the worst alcoholics claim to be teetotalers.

I'm just going by a gut feeling from his mannerisms. I suspect he's a hardcore user of alcohol, pills, street drugs, or something like that.

The situation that I allude to above is what drove me to go back and refamiliarize myself with how cults operate, particularly cults that are based by envy (socialism, feminism, etc.), as opposed to religion or mysticism.

In my case, it is like looking into the face of a zombie that used to be a happy little girl.

I have my suspicions about how this all came about. Preventing it would have required nothing short of a political revolution. These parasites are dug in deeper than an Alabama tick into the public school system. The Never Trump crew described in the article above are just one example of how shameless they are.

A revenue-maximizing therapist wants his patients to approach emotional health asymptotically, getting better over time, but neeever quite crossing the finish line into independence and happiness.

Of course , do they want their patients to be victors or victims. They left is filled with victims.
Do they focus on emotions or actions?
“Lay down here and tell me how that made you feel”

Well as a parent my instincts were to find out what happened, and then to survive the grief and to support my wife’s grief. Taking one step forward and living With a new reality. We actually did a lot of volunteering for several years to support other parents who lost a child from suicide. Most were predominantly male.

The way this kind of thing tends to work out with Trump is that he rope-a-dopes his detractors, and just when they are getting tired, and we're about to move on to a new Scandal of the Week, out come the leaks and background information that exposes the detractors as frauds.

Is anyone here old enough to remember Michael Avenatti or Robert Mueller?

Just look at his eyes! It's as if he's handled the One Ring of Power so long that he's turning into Gollum.

Ouch. That's dreadful!

I cannot imagine how I would react in a situation like like your son's. Although, I am familiar with a situation similar to your daughter's. In my case, it's like watching someone else's children playing with a Frisbee on the shoulder of a busy highway: There is nothing that I can do to stop it, but I cannot bring myself to look away.

I read that some shrinks "diagnosed" Barry Goldwater without having met him, and that he sued, and won.

Of course, they've never met nor examined the man.

I picture a ship going over a big waterfall...that's America.

An excellent Question. I do have some experience with two of these drugs. I will speak of This first because it more directly responds to your Query. My daughter was on Paxil as a young adult. When planning her first child. She , after 5 yrs on it , quit taking it. The initial withdrawal was crazy. She spoke of electrical type jolts in her head and a very unsettled feeling. What followed was a nightmare of OCD during her pregnancy. She had never had OCD before the Paxil. The wife and I were never happy about the prescription but our advice wasn’t considered.
But I did get to calm her down somewhat from 600 miles away as she sobbed uncontrollably into the phone daily for three months.
The other experience resulted in my sons suicide.
A friend gave him his amitriptyline to take for my sons knee pain. His classmate was prescribed it due to a nasty head injury snowboarding accident.
After it happened I sought out what info I could find. My son had hurt his knee playing basketball. The kid gave him a large dose . We of course found this out after it was too late.In my research I found out that the chemical found most often in some ones system after death from suicide is alcohol. The next most often found in the blood system was amitriptyline.

It's the pot calling the kettle black to use a euphemism. The mental health experts that want to testify at the impeachment hearing should be looking at the Dems like Schiff and others mental stability.

LOL! I just went on a playing a corrupt shrink rather short PC search for an expensive car that looked cool. I'm a retired state employee on a pension ex-Ford Honda man because that brand gives me very little $$ trouble. Had a Honda Accord that lasted 12 years before I became retired.
Now I drive an inexpensive 2013 Honda Fit that so far for six years has given me zero trouble. Decided I like a hatchback better that let's you flatten out the rear seats to add cargo space if needed.,

Good for you, Dino.

I have been driving Jags for decades.

Still sticking with an older model:

https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=...

This was the last large model with the leaping Jaguar on the hood. They discontinued that and now it costs $1,500 to have it installed.

Plus the new owner of Tata Motors of India went for the design that does not distinguish the Jag from an economy Japanese car. It is noisy, too. I drove a new model recently: noisy, beeps and whistles at every turn and corner to "warn" you of potential danger. And it goes for a whopping $100K.

We're definitely on the same page there...

I had remarked (before the election) that what we need in the WH is STRONG male
leadership. We got it.

Washington doesn't know what to do about a strong male outsider except to spin strength into "mental illness".

The media does a superb job of spinning this narrative.

Dangerous to the Deep State works for me. Stoke him up with a gallon of Espresso and let him loose in the middle of the Democratic National Convention ;^)

We can only hope that he is so drunk on his own fumes that he shows the world what a soulless hack he is.

Rhetorical question:

Which of those are so addictive that withdrawal symptoms are worse than the condition that they allegedly treat?

Psychology is not my field. All I have to go on is personal observation and anecdote.

My Myers-Briggs results using different online versions are fairly consistent, although many of the choices are false dichotomies. Mostly, I assume the result and choose the option that more closely fits my preconceptions.

Above, I was half-joking about about the Zodiac thing. It is like the party game, in which one tells the attendees to look around the room and note all of the blue things, gives them a few minutes, then tells them to close their eyes and list the yellow things in the room. Because they were focused on blue things, they have a very hard time remembering any yellow things.

Knowing that one is a Gemini Tiger, Aquarius Dragon, or any of the other 142 possible East/West Zodiac combinations can lead to confirmation bias in one's self-assessment and in one's assessment of others, in spite of knowing that the bias's foundation is complete mystical rubbish.

For example, knowing that Trump is a Gemini Dog—assuming that one were allegedly compatible with Geminis and Dogs—if he lashes out, one might conclude that he is having a bad day, whereas, if he had been a Taurus Monkey, then his outburst would be just more proof that he is out of control and untrustworthy.

It is this that I am mocking with regard to the radical activists posing as medical experts cited in the article above.

To highlight:

Psychologists study individual human behavior. They infer what is going on in their subjects' minds.