Mental health professionals who have expressed concern over what they see as Donald Trump’s declining faculties say that similar fears about Joe Biden’s are overblown.

“A few stumbled words are not the same as the extreme danger that result from a list of signs that Donald Trump has shown,” Bandy Lee, a psychiatrist on the faculty at the Yale School of Medicine, told Yahoo News, “and none of them apply to Joe Biden.”

Lee edited a collection of essays written by 27 mental health professionals titled “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” which detailed what the authors see as the risks posed by a leader who they regard as mentally and emotionally unfit for the most powerful office in the world.

Yet since Biden’s reemergence as a front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, Lee has been flooded by requests to assess the former vice president’s string of stumbles in public appearances. In response, she published a piece on Medium correcting what she sees as the false equivalence between Trump’s “mental instability” and Biden’s occasional gaffes.

Trump frequently misstates or invents statistics or facts in his speeches, and in remarks last year seemed confused on the birthplace of his own father, saying he was born in Germany. (It was the Bronx.) Biden bungled an appeal for campaign volunteers at a debate last year, and recently shared what appeared to be a false memory of being “arrested on the streets of Soweto,” in South Africa, on his way to visit Nelson Mandela. (He was briefly detained at an airport during an official visit, but not arrested.)

Joe Biden and Donald Trump. (Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: AP (2), Getty Images (2)) More

“None of them are catastrophically alarming the way the signs have been with Donald Trump. I think there needs to be a measure of proportion here. On the one hand, we have such mental instability and such great cognitive decline as well as neurological signs that show imminent risk to the entire human civilization, compared with some gaffes perhaps. If we’re not addressing the former, why are we even talking about the latter?”

To be sure, one reason the topic of Biden’s mental capacity has become an issue in the campaign is that he has often struggled to express himself at campaign events and debates. But Biden, who has struggled with a stutter since childhood, has been prone to bouts of inarticulateness for decades.

If he goes on to win the presidency, Biden would be, at 78, the oldest American ever sworn into office. Trump turns 74 in June.

Biden himself has said that discussing a candidate’s cognitive capacity is not off limits.

“It would be a totally legitimate thing for people to say, Let’s look at Biden. He would be the oldest guy to ever be president. See what kind of shape he’s in, mentally, physically and the rest,” Biden told PBS in a January interview.

But another reason for the renewed focus on Biden’s mental acuity is that supporters of his political rivals, Trump and Bernie Sanders, have been promoting it as an issue on social media.

The GOP is already diagnosing Biden with dementia. Full stop. And all he's doing is giving them more material.



This is like an electoral asteroid hurdling towards the Earth, and people are pretending it doesn't exist.



It exists.pic.twitter.com/97R8tdFvKd — Samuel D. Finkelstein II (@CANCEL_SAM) March 5, 2020

Mental health professionals tend to draw a distinction between Biden’s onstage missteps and what some of them regard as Trump’s propensity to bend reality to his purposes.

Biden “digresses and gets tangential, that’s not cognitive decline,” Lynne Meyer, a California psychologist told Yahoo News. “Trump’s cognitive decline or problems are that he doesn’t even seem to have comprehension of reality. That’s what it looks like.”

In 2018, Meyer joined more than 70 other mental health professionals in signing a letter to Trump’s then-physician Randy Jackson requesting that the president be given a mental health evaluation.