3 Apr 2025 – Go Retire Psychiatrist

First of all, if you looked up Saint therapy for depression, you might have accidentally found information on Saint Dymphna, the Catholic patron saint of those living with mental illness.

Actually, SAINT stands for Stanford accelerated intelligent neuromodulation therapy. It’s a personalized protocol for using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to treat severe depression. The University of Iowa is the first academic center to offer it in the Midwest.

This is a big step forward from the days many years ago when we were starting use right unilateral electrode placement for applying electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) to treat depression because it was thought to lead to fewer cognitive problems post-treatment.

SAINT is a game changer according to Dr. Nicholas Trapp, MD, assistant professor of psychiatry, who describes it as a method to pinpoint the best location in each patient’s brain to target with TMS to treat major depressive disorder. The procedure is quick and recovery from depression can be sustained for months.

Kudos to The University of Iowa. And maybe thanks to Saint Dymphna.

I read Dr. Moffic’s column today about the challenge in finding a rational solution to the objections many psychiatrists have to diagnosing President Donald Trump with a psychiatric disorder, despite the Goldwater Rule against doing that in any public forum.

Dr. Moffic points out that the high emotions aroused on both sides of the political aisle by the president has resulted in proposed legislation by Minnesota republican lawmakers to create a novel psychiatric diagnosis, Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), which may justify revising the Goldwater Rule, allowing psychiatrists to go public with diagnoses of President Trump.

I suspect that the TDS law was provoked by the conflict between democrats and republicans about the president. In fact, one of the Minnesota lawmakers has basically admitted that the bill was a prank by calling it “…tongue in cheek…” On the other hand, if this is just frustration between politicians, then I would expect that the whole thing might have been dropped a couple of weeks ago.

Yet, the bill still stands, albeit without any movement forward to committee. One of the authors, Senator Glenn Gruenhagen, has posted a comment on Facebook on March 17, 2025 (the day the bill was introduced), indicating that he knows democrats “…will never allow this bill to pass anyway, so take a breath and calm down.”

Can we do that, please? A good start might be to withdraw the bill.

I also saw a news story posted by The Guardian on March 26, 2025, quoting a New York City Child Psychiatrist, Leon Hoffman, MD, suggesting that the Goldwater Rule is too often broken, and, in response to the TDS gambit, that it might be preferable “…to develop a comparable national rule prohibiting political personnel, both elected and appointed, from creating psychiatric diagnoses as a tool against their political opponents.” Would anyone like to second that emotion?

You can’t just legislate restraint, respect and kindness in public or private discourse. Policies and laws can lay the groundwork for the eventual development of tolerance and maybe even acceptance of others. The Goldwater Rule is too often broken. The Golden Rule is too often broken as well.