The Ignorance of even the erudite

 I greatly admire the work of Bill Maher. He has an uncommonly searing insight into the stupidity of humanity, but one night, he told a joke that evaporated my respect for him. During a Real Time monologue, he asked, with his usual mix of flippancy and annoyance, 

“Where does Donald Trump get his news? From a passing mental patient?”

 Maher is not an ignorant man, but that night both he, and his audience, were wholly oblivious to the fact that mental patients have appeared on his show, and that mental patients even get their news from him, and that half of all American presidents were mental patients, or that he insulted so many actors and artists whom he calls colleagues and who identify as the mentally ill that the fact that none of his intended targets called him out for a public re-education speaks volume about the shame of the stigma. It is this self-reinforcing silence that binds the voices of the psychiatric community like a strait jacket.

Such accomplished and astute artists, who have no reason to hang their heads, as Jim Carrey, Richard Dreyfuss, Francis Ford Coppolla, Art Buchwald, Dick Cavett, Rosemary Clooney, Jane Pauley, Robert Downey, Larry Flynt, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Mel Gibson, Dave Chappelle, Rene Russo, Charlie Sheen, Ben Stiller all lay claim to a psychiatric diagnosis. Mental patients have won Nobels, Oscars, Pulitzers, Grammys, Emmys, a Presidential Medal of Freedom, won wars, invented calculus and Game Theory, composed the Fifth Symphony, painted The Scream, played in the NFL, NBA, NHL, raced NASCAR, held Heavyweight titles, served in Congress, earned Michelin stars, won beauty pageants, pioneered computer programming, are astrophysicists, surgeons, college professors, Olympic athletes, gave us Huckleberry Finn, A Christmas Carol, The Tell Tale Heart, War and Peace, A StreetCar Named Desire, For Whom The Bell Tolls,  The Great Gatsby, The Catcher in the Rye, Fahrenheit 451, and so many other classic works of art of creative geniuses that their achievements rival the great Greek, Roman, and Egyptian Empires. And yet, the image of a mental patient as a drooling idiot still dominates popular belief.