The Goldwater rule: why commenting on mental health from a distance is unhelpful

Is it okay to speculatively diagnose public figures like Trump? No, says the Goldwater rule - and recent challenges to it could set worrying precedents

This week the Goldwater rule has come into focus - the convention that psychologists should not give an opinion about the mental state of a person they have not examined. Recently, the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA) emailed its members to remind them that they as individual practitioners are not bound by the Goldwater rule (which is a rule of the American Psychiatric Association, APA), and that they should feel free to offer fact-based but non-specific assessments of public figures - figures like Donald Trump.