Does Newt Gingrich have personality disorder, narcissism, antisocial personality disorder?

I know that his two ex's have made certain statements that he has not replied to at all. Will you diagnose someone based on a few statements from a jilted spouse? My position is not that Gingrich is a saint but that (a) diagnosing a serious mental condition based on second hand biased testimony is not sound medical practice (b) I'm not trained to make such a diagnosis and reading a page from a medical text doesn't elevate me to that standard and (c) I'm not ready to say Gingrich is absolved of all his previous acts because he has an undiagnosed mental condition. As to his acts while Speaker, politics drives more unusual behavior than mental conditions. Just look at Romney bouncing from position to position.

Actually, his 2nd wife has described him as having mood swings, and she said she feels he lacks the emotional stability to handle the Presidency. And she compared him to his mother who did have psychiatric problems.

Newt, like Obama, is a narcissist, and to a pathological extent.

And let's not forget that Newt told his then-campaign manager that #2 was not young enough or pretty enough to be a president's wife. Then he dumped her. (As reported by his campaign manager).

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder; there's inner and outer beauty; some prefer the outer.

If you want to go diagnosing Newt then maybe you should start with his abandonment by this father or his depressive mother. Maybe he is acting out sexually after being taken advantage of by his teacher when he was sixteen. You could write any story you want with a background like that. This particular story fits a political agenda right now. I leave the psychiatry to those trained in it.

I don't know that trying to pigeon-hole Newt into a specific diagnostic category makes any sense, but many people, who do know him, describe a man who can be quite erratic, unpredictable, and, possibly, emotionally unstable.

Those are troubling concerns about someone who seeks the highest office, and they are aspects of his personality that are worthy of some consideration, investigation, and discussion. If others said he drank excessively, or possibly abused prescription drugs, we wouldn't ignore those sort of factors. So, I'm not sure we should disregard indications of impulsivity, or poor judgment, or anything else, that emerges as a pattern in his behavior, that is suggestive of an underlying disorder of some sort, that might affect his decision-making abilities.

I think there are enough incidences that's been reported to show his unstable personality, but that doesn't seem to bother people who support him.

Maybe, they're looking for Dr Strangelove.

I'm completely good with saying the guy is a loose cannon therefore I shouldn't vote for him. I'm even good thinking to myself "that guy should get some help." I'm not for diagnosing him with some disorder by just observing his politics. It's just another political smear. I think if we wanted to we could pull out the pysch book and diagnose ourselves with all sorts of disorders.

(That and it seems that every relationship question we get on the board seems to end up saying "my boy(girl)friend is a classical narcissist". It's the all purpose excuse for bad behavior.)

I'm not sure that there is much difference, in reality, between saying that Newt is a "loose canon" or saying he suffers from a "personality disorder"--descriptively they really amount to the same thing--the man is erratic, unpredictable, and unstable, it's just being called by different names.

Except that's not how the DSM-IV is actually used in practice by clinicians. It's a classification manual, the ultimate purpose of which is to categorize and identify specific disorders mainly for purposes of insurance reimbursement, research, funding, etc. It's an overly simplified communication/classification scheme.
A diagnostic label from that manual really doesn't signify much beyond that. The diagnosing of pathology, in actual practice, is judged by an individual's actual behavior, and patterns of behavior, not from those labels. But, if someone, and their doctor, wants an insurance company to reimburse treatment costs, one of those labels has to be used, and the label is not applied or used pejoratively, it's only descriptive.
The DSM-IV was never intended to be a how-to book, where you look up symptoms to try to identify an actual disorder more accurately, in fact, it's used in the opposite way--already identifiable symptoms are squeezed into somewhat arbitrary diagnostic categories simply for classification, and individual variations and complexity are largely ignored, so those labels don't tell you a great deal about any given individual.

So, I don't think it would really do Newt justice to slap any of those formal DSM-IV diagnostic labels on him, they are too overly simplified and possibly misleading. The real man is far more complicated than that, and his actual functioning is quite effective--he's very successful--so by no stretch is he really hindered by maladaptive behaviors--as his track record shows, the man does have some capacity to personally and publicly reinvent himself in a way that works for him, even if he sometimes relies on public amnesia to pull that off, and even if he's kidding himself in his self appraisals.

But terms like "narcissist" and "paranoid" are used descriptively, and not just diagnostically, in our every day communications, generally in a negative sense, and, in those instances, they might be a valid form of transmitting information about someone who is egotistic or very secretive and mistrustful. Whether we want to go a step further, and consider the man "sick", instead of being a rat who cheats on his wives, or someone who has just been reckless in his political decisions, is a different matter. As a potential Presidential nominee, I'm considerably less interested in whether Newt can be diagnosed with a specific disorder than I am in simply whether I can trust him, or can anticipate how he might behave in office, and I just don't need diagnostic labels to help me evaluate those things. Calling him "sick", or the victim of a psychiatric disorder, wouldn't make his behavior more palatable to me, or make me more likely to excuse it, or even cause me to view him in a harsher light, or even help me to understand him better.

That may be the only thing on which you and I might really disagree. I don't see the whole issue of talking about Newt's personality traits as being a "smear"--I think these things, and as much of his real personality as we can glean from any source, is perfectly valid in trying to evaluate the man and his fitness for office. And, in that regard, I'm not sure it makes much difference what sort of terminology we use to describe him, or talk about him, as long as we're being accurate about the behaviors we're referring to.

I agree with your thesis; Newt is a loose cannon, and should never be considered for any president of any country.