How We Each Emerged From Isolation,Found Each Other and a Common Voice

Abstract

The three authors of this article met in a purpose-driven way: They were each experiencing alarm at Donald Trump grounded in their individual professional experience. They responded to the challenge of watching a man who, in their view, was clearly unfit to serve as president, but, as with the emperor with no clothes, remained unconfronted by those with the greatest capacity to delineate the risks he embodied. Their national professional associations had discouraged and, in the case of the American Psychiatric Association, even threatened reprisals for their extending their expertise to a public that seemed confused and misled by the maelstrom of distraction, false promises, and showmanship that was Donald Trump. The authors discovered one another through the process of finding their individual voices. None of them imagined that, in pooling their perspectives, they would forge a collaborative alliance that would support the writing and dissemination of over two dozen shared authorship endeavors in the popular and professional media over the crucial period of the first 3 years. Evolving trust and camaraderie have supported and also grown through shared determination and action that have been part of increasing the public’s awareness of the dangerousness of Donald Trump.