Bush Using Drugs to Control Depression, Erratic
Behavior
By TERESA HAMPTON
Editor, Capitol Hill Blue
Jul 28, 2004, 08:09
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President George W. Bush is taking powerful
anti-depressant drugs to control his erratic behavior,
depression and paranoia, Capitol Hill Blue has
learned.

The prescription drugs, administered by Col. Richard
J. Tubb, the White House physician, can impair the
President’s mental faculties and decrease both his
physical capabilities and his ability to respond to a
crisis, administration aides admit privately.

“It’s a double-edged sword,” says one aide. “We can’t
have him flying off the handle at the slightest
provocation but we also need a President who is alert
mentally.”


Angry Bush walked away from reporter's questions.
Tubb prescribed the anti-depressants after a
clearly-upset Bush stormed off stage on July 8,
refusing to answer reporters' questions about his
relationship with indicted Enron executive Kenneth J.
Lay.

“Keep those motherfuckers away from me,” he screamed
at an aide backstage. “If you can’t, I’ll find someone
who can.”

Bush’s mental stability has become the topic of
Washington whispers in recent months. Capitol Hill
Blue first reported on June 4 about increasing concern
among White House aides over the President’s wide mood
swings and obscene outbursts.

Although GOP loyalists dismissed the reports an
anti-Bush propaganda, the reports were later confirmed
by prominent George Washington University psychiatrist
Dr. Justin Frank in his book Bush on the Couch: Inside
the Mind of the President. Dr. Frank diagnosed the
President as a “paranoid meglomaniac” and “untreated
alcoholic” whose “lifelong streak of sadism, ranging
from childhood pranks (using firecrackers to explode
frogs) to insulting journalists, gloating over state
executions and pumping his hand gleefully before the
bombing of Baghdad” showcase Bush’s instabilities.

“I was really very unsettled by him and I started
watching everything he did and reading what he wrote
and watching him on videotape. I felt he was
disturbed,” Dr. Frank said. “He fits the profile of a
former drinker whose alcoholism has been arrested but
not treated.”

Dr. Frank’s conclusions have been praised by other
prominent psychiatrists, including Dr. James
Grotstein, Professor at UCLA Medical Center, and Dr.
Irvin Yalom, MD, Professor Emeritus at Stanford
University Medical School.

The doctors also worry about the wisdom of giving
powerful anti-depressant drugs to a person with a
history of chemical dependency. Bush is an admitted
alcoholic, although he never sought treatment in a
formal program, and stories about his cocaine use as a
younger man haunted his campaigns for Texas governor
and his first campaign for President.

“President Bush is an untreated alcoholic with
paranoid and megalomaniac tendencies,” Dr. Frank adds.

The White House did not return phone calls seeking
comment on this article.

Although the exact drugs Bush takes to control his
depression and behavior are not known, White House
sources say they are “powerful medications” designed
to bring his erratic actions under control. While Col.
Tubb regularly releases a synopsis of the President’s
annual physical, details of the President’s health and
any drugs or treatment he may receive are not public
record and are guarded zealously by the secretive
cadre of aides that surround the President.

Veteran White House watchers say the ability to
control information about Bush’s health, either
physical or mental, is similar to Ronald Reagan’s
second term when aides managed to conceal the
President’s increasing memory lapses that signaled the
onslaught of Alzheimer’s Disease.

It also brings back memories of Richard Nixon’s final
days when the soon-to-resign President wondered the
halls and talked to portraits of former Presidents.
The stories didn’t emerge until after Nixon left
office.

One long-time GOP political consultant who – for
obvious reasons – asked not to be identified said he
is advising his Republican Congressional candidates to
keep their distance from Bush.

“We have to face the very real possibility that the
President of the United States is loony tunes,” he
says sadly. “That’s not good for my candidates, it’s
not good for the party and it’s certainly not good for
the country.”

© Copyright 2004 by Capitol Hill Blue