Why is Tr*mp the Way He Is?:
Antivaxxers, Autism, Schizophrenia: The Dangers of Denying Psychological Difference
You know, I suspect I know part of what’s wrong with Donald J. Tr*mp. Like so many things, it starts in the family. A family narrative of mental illness denial by Mimi Nichter and my own life experience with special-needs siblings may partially explain why he is the way he is. It’ll take a journey to get there, so stay with me.
Professor Mimi Nichter wrote a HuffPost piece about her family secret. Entitled “My Family Taught Me To Hide The Truth About My Brother: I Wish They Hadn’t,” she tells of her brother. He was not like everyone else. She tells of her family’s shame at his difference. She tells of how her parents demeaned him for something he couldn’t help, calling him an “idiot,” hiding him away when guests came to visit. And his siblings went along with it.
They all pretended he didn’t exist. They erased him from existence. Only when her sister took a psychology course in college did they begin to see what the issue was — schizophrenia — but still the parents refused to seek help until her brother was well into his twenties.
They bought into the excuses made in studies run by white males for white males, studies that blamed everything on the mother. Her parents made no plans for his future as if, having mentally disappeared him, he would physically cease to exist after their deaths.
As a professor, like Dr. Nichter, I’ve noticed fellow professors who denied their children’s issues. Academically brilliant colleagues often had the biggest problems with perceived differences, imperfections, in their children.
This fear of imperfections may explain why so many college-educated white women have joined the anti-vax craze, letting myths make them fearful that their children might become autistic, overdosing their children with one substance (vitamin A) that can cause permanent liver damage (and more) in order to avoid another substance (measles vaccine) that could keep them alive.
I’ve been asked about the “college-educated white women” part of this essay, but University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics has done a study confirming my observations that many antivaxxers are “Whole Foods Moms,” educated white women making good money.
The fear-of-autism part is particularly offensive to me, for reasons that will be explained later. In my experience, it’s clear that these parents would rather risk the actual lives of their children than have them be autistic, that is, “imperfect.” They seem okay with physical disabilities, but intellectual difference seems…well…different.
And if you think about it, that makes sense. College-educated white women and been bombarded with mixed messages about motherhood and career. They consider their intellectual ability as a “plus.” But if their children don’t share that ability, what then? According to “Max,” a person on the autism spectrum who wrote an article for Newsweek, these white women fear autism worse than death:
[b]ecause they equate it with mental illness and brain damage, and assume that people with autism are damaged.
Two of my white female former colleagues had children whose problems I recognized when they were toddlers, but both sets of parents denied the problems until their sons, always the sons, were grown men, too big to handle physically, too old to train mentally. I saw it happen before my very eyes in the decades I taught in Texas. Colleagues in the social sciences department tried to tell them, but they wouldn’t listen. Just like Nichter’s parents, each hoped their son would “grow out of it.”
That could have been me.
When my brothers were born, they were beautiful twins, healthy in any observable respect. Six months passed. They weren’t talking. A year passed. They weren’t talking. We’d always been early talkers on both sides of the family. Something was out of kilter.
“Out of kilter”? I almost said something was “wrong.” But it wasn’t wrong; it was only different.
My father, career military in the Vietnam era, was in and out of Southeast Asia. Unlike Dr. Nichter’s mother, ours sought help. Little was known of autism at the time, but my mother was an elementary school teacher who knew childhood development patterns inside out, so existing knowledge and her experience were enough to make that preliminary diagnosis. Interestingly, the same kinds of aforementioned studies blamed everything on the mother.
Mom felt some guilt because she had thought two children were enough in a two-career black family. Problem is, like the Obamas, the first two kids were girls. Both Mom’s and Dad’s sides of the family favored boys so, unlike the Obamas, they’d tried again, but she’d still had doubts since Dad was often gone for a year, or more, at a time. But they’d been born and they were beautiful. I was only seven when they were born; my sister was five.
However, what I’ve seen anecdotally in black families, especially those from the rural South is that they accept people as they are. We lived through the Jim Crow era. The poll tax era. The segregated housing era. I’ve known white families who cut off relatives who married outside their race or who are gay. I’ve never in all my years (and middle age is increasingly distant in my rearview mirror) seen that in a black family. Hard truths about our kinfolk are nonetheless truths.
Sure, neighbors might comment, “he’s not quite right” or “that’s just the way he is” but there was never any question of denying their existence. There was never any question of hiding them from family and friends. Certainly, if the event was likely to agitate my brothers, we might cut a family reunion day short but, quite frankly, I was generally glad when that happened. I was glad to stay with them in the motel room while they watched TV or listened to music and I read a book. If they rocked or hummed, nobody stared or said a word because that’s just the way they were.
And as for the meds, Nichter’s parents waited so long, too long. It would always have been difficult to create and maintain a medical regimen. My brothers are not high-functioning enough to live alone, so that would not be an issue for us. We give them the meds; they take them. They were used to that from their pre-teen years. Of course, we’d go through years of experimentation, adjustments, and balancing of psychotropic meds; that’s still a part of our life as they pass through the stages of aging and meds need continuing adjustments.
In my teen years, I began to read the fine print because I hadn’t trusted authorities since two seminal life events:
In fifth grade, our social studies book had mentioned “happy slaves.” That was one event. Even at the age of ten, I refused to accept the narrative that we were happy as slaves, that there were “good masters” as the Nottoway apologists still try to convince us.
Later, I found out that organizations, like the United Daughters of the Confederacy, run by white women, purposely mischaracterized slavery in elementary school textbooks to defend the “ideals” of their men in the defeated Confederacy and schools like the Citadel in South Carolina were led by white men who thought “the greatest social crime of all the ages” was freeing “African slaves wholly incapable of freedom.”
Then, when I was thirteen and my menstrual cycle began with horrendous, debilitating cramps, a white male physician decided that the pain was all “up there” in my head. “No,” I corrected him, thinking he had misheard, I grabbed at my abdomen, “It’s all down here!” Mom believed me and found another doctor who gave me birth control pills, a newly available medication. This white female physician had read the fine print that suggested the pills might help with my condition. They did. That was the second event.
From that point, I read the fine print. And it’s a good thing I did.
Once, when the physicians prescribed something new for one of my brothers, big cramping knots broke out at his joints, causing him to scream in pain. We rushed for help. I was able to tell the staff what was happening because I had read the fine print for the new medication, fine print that said this could happen, fine print the physician hadn’t bothered to study. I was appalled.
From that point, I’d check their meds for changes every time I’d come back home. I still do and last year found yet another issue with a medication and dosage a physician’s assistant (who never corrected people who called her “doctor”) had prescribed. I found a new physician, an actual physician. Issue resolved.
At this point, you may wonder why I mention race in this narrative. If you read some of my other works, especially What Do You Have to Lose?, you’ll find references to patterns in the medical community, especially among white and Asian physicians, where studies show black patients are treated with less vigor and concern, not to mention fewer pain meds, than white patients.
The tale of Serena Williams’ pregnancy complications is a case in point. As a professional athlete, knowing her body inside out, she saved her own life and that of her baby, by insisting on treatment the “medical professionals” didn’t think she needed.
After my experience with the “it’s all up there” physician, I suspected that gender and maybe race might explain the treatment we (and Serena) received. Years later, my suspicions were confirmed. My family’s acceptance of my brothers and my knowledge of inequities made my advocacy on their behalf both necessary and successful.
Meanwhile, my younger sister, the attorney, had convinced my parents that it would be irresponsible to leave this world with no plans made for their sons. Both parents were raised in rural Arkansas, but these college-degreed adults still hung on to superstitious thoughts that making a will meant they’d die soon. But my sister was not called “chief” for nothing. She kept at them until both made wills and signed documents making my sister and me our brothers’ legal conservators. Unexpectedly, they were relieved. We were able to step up because our parents always respected our agency and judgment.
Years passed.
When it became clear that my parents were getting beyond caring for my brothers, yet were still in good enough health to care for themselves, my sister and I stepped in and found a “family model” home for them, a couple who specialized in making a home for small numbers of those with special needs. My brothers got healthier food, more exercise, and more outside activities.
I’m back home in the Deep South, having returned to care for both parents, but now just my elderly father since Mom died at the age of 90. She outlived all twelve of her siblings, even the two younger than she herself. I still fill out my brothers’ annual Social Security and Medicaid paperwork, monitor their meds, find new doctors when they need them (that’s how I caught the recent issue), and take them out for a monthly treat and an annual week-long vacation.
My sister attends their annual care-accessing meeting and plans Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners for the family. It’s true, she’s been a bit prone to shame at their unconventional behaviors, rocking or humming to themselves. She didn’t have them at her wedding decades ago and didn’t want them at Mom’s funeral. I couldn’t control her wedding situation, which broke Mom’s heart, but nearly forty years later, I put my foot down on the funeral situation.
Because they need patterns in life, change was hard for them. They needed to know. They needed to be sure. At the interment, she admitted I’d been right. And now when Dad mistakes me for Mom, one of my brothers always insists, “No, Dad, my mother has passed away.” And Dad remembers.
But wait, I started this with a comment on DJT. There was a reason. I’m a lifelong educator, professor, with a degree in education. My mom had two degrees and additional certification in education. And I have both lived and observed experience with the dangers of ignoring reality.
There are indications in DJT, not just of disability, but of possible pathology. He has trouble reading, what White House staffers quoted in The Week call a “lethal aversion to reading. As reported by The Independent, he needs pictures in briefings. The Standard comments on his abnormally short attention span. Politico quotes sources on his tantrums. His fits of violence led to placement in a military school, fits that continued there, as recalled by a classmate in the Daily Beast.
My former colleagues’ children showed similar signs, though some of their tantrums clearly stemmed from frustration at being unable to meet their parents’ unreasonable expectations, rather than from pathology. Perhaps the same initially applied to DJT.
Back in his childhood and teen years, psychological disabilities would have been virtually unknown as diagnosable entities. Any father who knew something was “off” but couldn’t face imperfections in their child might go straight into denial without passing “Go,” while passing on hundreds of millions of dollars to prove nothing was wrong with his boy. In those days, society dictated that anything wrong with the child reflected on the parents — bad blood or bad child-rearing. His mother, an immigrant who was often ill, could not engage. I wonder if he was ever shown love.
Once he had his own children, DJT claims never to have changed a diaper for any of the five. He also claims never to have taken them to a park, yet he talked about dating his eldest daughter and the potential chest breadth of his youngest when she was an infant. Pathology? Did he ever show them love?
I wonder if his mother’s illness is why he resents women. I wonder if, like Hitler, he questions his own blood and deflects his fears onto the blood of others, aping the “poisoning the blood” myths of Nazi Germany. Is this why he is welcoming white South Africans who have never done anything for this country, while kidnapping law-abiding brown South Americans who have helped build our houses, harvest our crops, and care for our elderly.
I wonder whether, if his parents had accepted that he needed help, he could have been a better, less dangerous person. Perhaps not, but I wonder. He seems increasingly unhealthy for himself and our nation.
Professor Nichter has come to grips with her brother and has established what seems like a healthier, more affectionate, relationship with him. My brothers are healthy and well-cared for. We’re going to a movie next week. No need to wonder. They’re loved.
NOTE: My sincere gratitude goes to Flaminia D for her thoughtful comments that added significantly to this essay.
