Should it be taboo to discuss the mental health of politicians?

Monday 2 February 2026

The question of whether it should be taboo to discuss the mental health of politicians sits uneasily at the intersection of medicine, ethics, journalism and democratic accountability. It is a subject that repeatedly resurfaces during moments of political stress, when leaders appear erratic, impulsive or unusually detached from institutional constraints. The controversy surrounding Donald Trump's behaviour, often seen as erratic in foreign capitals, has merely sharpened a debate that long predates him and that will persist long after he has left the political stage.

At one level, the argument for taboo is straightforward. Mental health is a matter of personal dignity. Even in public life there remains a legitimate expectation of privacy, particularly regarding medical conditions. Psychiatric diagnoses are complex, probabilistic and often contested even amongst professionals. To speculate at a distance, without examination, risks crude armchair psychology masquerading as insight. There is also the danger of stigma. If mental illness becomes a rhetorical weapon in political debate, it reinforces the false idea that psychological conditions are synonymous with unfitness, danger or moral failure. In societies that still struggle to treat mental health with seriousness and compassion, this is no small concern.

There is moreover a professional norm that has sought to enforce restraint. In the United States the so-called Goldwater Rule discourages psychiatrists from offering diagnoses of public figures they have not examined. Similar ethical instincts exist elsewhere, even if not codified. The principle is sound: medicine should not be bent into a partisan tool, and clinicians should not be drawn into political combat under the guise of expertise.

Yet the case for absolute taboo is less convincing. Politics is not an ordinary profession. Those who hold executive power exercise authority over war and peace, economic stability, public health and civil liberties. Their judgment, impulse control, relationship with reality and capacity to process information are not incidental attributes; they are central to the office itself. Democratic systems already accept that physical health may be a legitimate subject of scrutiny. When leaders conceal strokes, advanced cancer or debilitating illness, controversy tends to follow, not because the public is prurient but because incapacity at the apex of power has consequences.

Mental health cannot be neatly severed from this logic. Certain psychological traits and conditions may materially affect decision-making under stress, tolerance for dissent, susceptibility to flattery or paranoia about perceived enemies. To insist that such matters are wholly off-limits is to create an artificial sanctuary around precisely those characteristics that may most endanger constitutional order.

The difficulty lies in drawing distinctions. There is a profound difference between diagnosing and describing. Journalists and citizens are not required to pretend that observable behaviour does not exist. Patterns of speech, inconsistency, impulsive policy reversals, fixation on personal grievance, or indifference to empirical correction are not psychiatric labels; they are political facts. Analysing their implications for governance is not the same as declaring a clinical condition. Indeed to forbid any language that gestures towards mental states risks impoverishing political analysis to the point of absurdity. Politics, after all, is conducted by human beings, not abstractions.

The Trump presidency brought these tensions into unusually sharp relief. His rhetorical style, emotional volatility and disregard for established norms led many commentators to reach instinctively for psychological explanations. Some did so clumsily or irresponsibly. Others attempted, with varying degrees of care, to explore how personality structure and temperament interacted with institutional checks. The problem was not that mental health entered the discussion, but that the discussion often collapsed into diagnostic shorthand, weaponised insults or amateur certainty.

A more defensible approach would reject taboo without embracing licence. It would accept that mental health, broadly understood, is relevant to public office, while insisting on rigour, humility and restraint. Journalists should describe behaviour precisely and avoid speculative clinical language unless grounded in direct evidence or authoritative sources. Medical professionals should resist the temptation to issue pronouncements from afar, but may legitimately educate the public about general phenomena such as narcissistic traits, cognitive decline or stress-induced impairment, without attaching them definitively to named individuals.

There is also a deeper democratic question at stake. Treating mental health as unspeakable risks reinforcing a misleading ideal of the leader as an autonomous, rational actor untouched by vulnerability. In reality power amplifies psychological tendencies rather than erasing them. A mature political culture should be capable of acknowledging this without cruelty or sensationalism. Doing so may even encourage greater transparency, earlier intervention and more realistic expectations of those who govern.

Ultimately, the issue is not whether mental health should be discussed, but how and why. When it is invoked to delegitimise opponents, excuse prejudice or provide a substitute for substantive critique, it should rightly be resisted. When it is examined as one factor amongst many shaping political behaviour, with care for evidence and language, it is not merely legitimate but necessary. The taboo, if one exists, should attach not to the subject itself, but to its careless misuse.