Some Disabilities Still Scare Voters

[From article]
a commander in chief who disclosed a mental illness would face an almost insurmountable political problem: “Every time he said a cross word or expressed frustration, people would say, ‘He’s having one of those days.’”
[. . .]
And as recently as the last election cycle, congressional and state-level campaigns were digging up past psychiatric treatment to bludgeon their opponents.
“Any vulnerability can be exploited by people and will be,” explains Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House and presidential candidate, whose late mother had bipolar disorder. “That’s just the nature of a very rough-and-tumble-type business.”
[. . .]
“crazy” remains a politically acceptable epithet, whether it’s Obama taunting Republican opponents or Representative Trey Gowdy quipping that he did not want to wrangle members of the House in a leadership position because he did not “have a background in mental health.”
[. . .]
Nixon and John F. Kennedy clandestinely filled their medicine cabinets with psychotropic drugs, recently uncovered documents reveal. In fact, Kennedy aide and historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. suggested in his journals that several modern presidents were mentally unbalanced; he recorded top aides arguing whether President Lyndon Johnson was clinically paranoid or a manic-depressive, and fretted that there was no constitutional “procedure for dealing with nuts.”
In other words, mental illness is surely more common in Washington than the public knows or wants to believe.
[. . .]
scientists are still trying to understand the underlying medical causes of most mental illnesses, they are at least partly environmental;

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/10/politics-mental-illness-history-213276

Could America Elect a Mentally Ill President?
Yes. In fact, we probably already did.
By Alex Thompson
November/December 2015