There is no question that Donald Trump makes many people, myself included, profoundly uncomfortable. His politics are repulsive enough, but it’s more the way he conducts himself personally. Above all, it’s the apparent belief that he can bulldoze his version of reality through clear evidence to the contrary – that, a year on from his inauguration, has many still struggling to process the fact that this man is US president. Those of us who have been diagnosed with mental health problems face an additional head-twister.

We are repeatedly told by friends and colleagues and commentators in the media that the man is “barking”, a certified “nutter”, a “lunatic”, and any number of other choice terms used to describe the tribe of which I am officially a member. For I am indeed a certified nutter. I have been sectioned, and it doesn’t get more certified than that.

And yet, among the hundreds of “nutters” I’ve known, both on the wards and in the community, I have yet to meet one who even vaguely resembles Trump.

Indeed, while the range of personalities on the wards is as varied as in the world outside, in my experience, self-doubt and lack of confidence are far more common among “nutters” than any sort of Trumpish bombast. You are much more likely to encounter empathy, compassion and a sense of solidarity than playground bullying.

I remember one woman who had lived through the most hideous childhood imaginable. All her brothers were in prison and both her sisters were receiving psychiatric care. One day she presented me with a small, wooden box she had made and hand-painted, because, she said, she could see that I was having a hard time. Twenty years later, I still have the box. In fact, it is sitting on my desk. The woman who made it is no longer alive, but if she were, would she really belong in the same camp as Trump?

For me, the answer to that question is, perhaps surprisingly, “yes”. But only because I do not believe that there is any “Camp Nutter”. Or if there is, then we are all of us in it. Mental health problems are human problems, and neither they, nor the people who experience them (which is everyone to varying degrees) belong in a separate category, however reassuring it might be to be able to banish there those who disappoint, outrage, or repulse us – if only to make clear how fundamentally they differ from ourselves.

None of which is to suggest that it is inappropriate to question Trump’s mental fitness for office, a different matter entirely from laughing and shouting “nutter”. But even so, it seems to me that those professionals who do, would be wise to tread carefully. The history of the relationship between psychiatry and politics is chequered to say the least.

The use of psychiatric detention for political ends in the Nazi era, the Soviet Union and China is well known. Less so, are instances in the US. In The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease, psychiatrist Jonathan Metzl describes how African-Americans were diagnosed with schizophrenia at the Ionia state hospital in Michigan in response to their civil rights ideas.

The cause here is, of course, very different, but we must bear in mind that what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, too.