Again, I was influenced by my father, who was very much an atheist and took pride in combating the traditional or orthodox forms of Judaism, which his parents and which my mother's parents were very steeped in.
But when I went to Hiroshima and began to study or just listen to people's descriptions of their work, it was quite clear they were talking about death all the time, about people dying all around them, about their own fear of death.
When I was still in my psychiatric residency training in New York City, I was subjected to the doctor draft of that time, during the early fifties, at the time of the Korean War.
We have a duty to warn on an individual basis if we are treating someone who may be dangerous to herself or to others - a duty to warn people who are in danger from that person. We feel it's our duty to warn the country about the danger of this president. If we think we have learned something about Donald Trump and his psychology that is dangerous to the country, yes, we have an obligation to say so.
Sometimes its said that psychiatrists are doctors who are frightened by the sight of blood. I might have fallen into that category.
I did the first study because I had been exposed to something that I took to be important and interesting - this thought reform process - in the military.
But I spent just two calendar years at Cornell University, though it was covering more than three years of work, and then went to medical school and did become interested in psychiatry, and even helped form a kind of psychiatry club in medical school.
Donald Trump doesn't have clear contact with reality, though I'm not sure it qualifies as a bona fide delusion. He needs things to be a certain way even though they aren't, and that's one reason he lies. There can also be a conscious manipulative element to it. When he put forward, and politically thrived on, the falsehood of President Obama's birth in Kenya, outside the United States, he was manipulating that lie as well as undoubtedly believing it in part, at least in a segment of his personality.
I learned a lot from Vietnam veterans, especially as some of them turned against their own war.
Every adult in the world has some sense that he or she might be obliterated at any time by these weapons that we have created.
As a kid I was fascinated with sports, and I loved sports more than anything else. The first books I read were about sports, like books about Baseball Joe, as one baseball hero was called.
People with what we call mental illness can indeed serve well, and people who have no discernible mental illness - and that may be true of Trump - may not be able to serve, may be quite unfit. So it isn't always the question of a psychiatric diagnosis. It's really a question of what psychological and other traits render one unfit or dangerous.
There are people who believe that there should be a standard psychiatric examination for every presidential candidate and for every president. But these are difficult issues because they can't ever be entirely psychiatric. They're inevitably political as well. I personally believe that ultimately ridding the country of a dangerous president or one who's unfit is ultimately a political matter, but that psychological professionals can contribute in valuable ways to that decision.
There's more and more recognition that a carbon economy is dangerous to us economically. And there is increasing recognition that renewable fuels have economic value as well as obvious value for our health and our well-being and our survival. In fact, as you know, the economic revolution in renewable fuels has been impressive. It really had not been anticipated.
