Hannibal Lecter Makes a Scary Psychiatric Appearance in the Presidential Race

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PSYCHIATRIC VIEWS ON THE DAILY NEWS

In the speeches at the Republican National Convention last week, I was particularly interested in any coverage of mental health or illness. I heard little until a brief portion of the nomination acceptance speech brought me to puzzled, but goose-bumped attention:

“Has anyone seen “Silence of the Lambs”? The late great Hannibal Lecter. He’d love to have you for dinner. That’s insane asylums, they’re emptying out their insane asylums.”

It was not the first time Hannibal Lecter was raised in a political rally. On May 13, 2024, Philip Bump wrote, “Why Donald Trump ended up praising Hollywood’s most famous cannibal” for the Washington Post.¹ This occurred at a New Jersey rally and Lecter was described as a wonderful man, referring to the final scene in “Silence of the Lambs” where Lecter is about to murder someone and that other countries are emptying out their insane asylums and mental institutions into the United States. The difference between the 2 institutions is defined as:

“An insane symptom is a mental institution on steroids.”

For those not familiar with “Silence of the Lambs,” it is a 1991 horror movie that became the only horror film to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards. It centers on Hannibal Lecter, a psychiatrist cannibalistic murderer who is incarcerated at Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Clarice, a top student at the FBI, is asked to obtain certain information from him about another killer. Clarice later reveals that she had a childhood trauma in hearing lambs screaming at their slaughter in a barn. After more cannibalistic episodes, Lecter escapes at the end, and is about to kill the psychiatrist administrator of the hospital in the Bahamas, saying:

“Excuse me, I’m about to have a friend for dinner.”

If you know the movie or found out after the speeches, or even subliminally, this is political fear mongering at its extreme to influence voting. It is suggesting that immigrants from the south are liable to be just like Lecter.

However, because Lecter is a psychiatrist, it can also elicit old stigmatized fears of psychiatrists and psychiatric patients. As I wrote in a published letter to the editor of the New York Times on June 17, 2017, titled “The Worst Psychiatrist,” like most undue fears, there is always a tinge of reality. Radovan Karadzic is a real-life psychiatrist who became a fugitive Bosnian Serb war leader. He was captured in 2008 and sentenced to 40 years in prison for genocide and other crimes against humanity. He clearly went against our essential medical ethical Hippocratic principle: Do no harm. He used his psychiatric knowledge in service of terrorism. Fortunately, he is an extreme rarity, for both Karadzic and Lecter convey anti-humanitarianism at its extreme.

While I am not exactly sure how the sentences talking about Lecter all fit together, they do seem to convey fear of the mentally ill and psychiatrists, a major cause of stigma in our field. Not only that, and not to produce my own fear mongering, but it can increase danger and risk to those with mental illnesses.

The repeated admiring reference to Lecter in well-attended and media covered events behooves our field to not only protest such fear-producing and stigmatizing material regardless of political preferences, but now, especially with the dramatic change yesterday in the nomination process of one party, we may need to monitor mental health references as the campaigns heat up emotionally. While the Goldwater Rule ethically rules against us assessing the mental health of public figures, we can still monitor the political platforms and communications about mental health.

Using our nickname of “shrinks,” we need to shrink the mental health risks. Please join me in doing so.

Dr Moffic is an award-winning psychiatrist who specialized in the cultural and ethical aspects of psychiatry and is now in retirement and retirement as a private pro bono community psychiatrist. A prolific writer and speaker, he has done a weekday column titled “Psychiatric Views on the Daily News” and a weekly video, “Psychiatry & Society,” since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged. He was chosen to receive the 2024 Abraham Halpern Humanitarian Award from the American Association for Social Psychiatry. Previously, he received the Administrative Award in 2016 from the American Psychiatric Association, the one-time designation of being a Hero of Public Psychiatry from the Speaker of the Assembly of the APA in 2002, and the Exemplary Psychiatrist Award from the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill in 1991. He is an advocate and activist for mental health issues related to climate instability, physician burnout, and xenophobia. He is now editing the final book in a 4-volume series on religions and psychiatry for Springer: Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, Christianity, and now The Eastern Religions, and Spirituality. He serves on the Editorial Board of Psychiatric Times.

Reference

1. Bump P. Why Donald Trump ended up praising Hollywood’s most famous cannibal. The Washington Post. May 13, 2024. Accessed July 22, 2024. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/05/13/trump-hannibal-lecter-immigration/