Sunday, June 14, 2009
Opinion, Politics, Atlanta

Why Mayor Franklin needs a psychological evaluation

“You have trouble handling anything that may be perceived as criticism.”—www.MayoClinic.com, on narcissistic personality disorder

Mayor Shirley Franklin attends a masked ball. Did she choose the peacock motif?
Spark St. Jude

By Stephanie Ramage

Mayor Shirley Franklin has spent the past few weeks sermonizing about the destructive power of angry words and how they reflect on the mental health of those who utter them.

Apparently, the mayor doesn’t listen to her own sermons. From besmirching reporters like me who criticize her policies, to saying, when she was running for office, that she would have "been better off to shoot” her ex-husband “than to divorce him,” Franklin’s remarks have raised some disturbing questions: Do her words convey the state of her own mental health, as she says is the case for others? Or does she, like narcissists and sociopaths, believe that life is a performance, that words and actions are merely means to an end, and that everyone else, and everything else, exists to fulfill her own goals? Is that why she finds it so easy to ignore harrowing reports of crime against the citizens she is supposed to look out for? What is her recent flurry of indignation really about? Paranoia? Insecurity? Guilt?
 
I’m not a shrink, but neither is Franklin, and since Franklin can order (via her lapdog Chief Pennington) someone who criticizes her, like Sgt. Scott Kreher, to get a psychological evaluation—which subsequently revealed him to be mentally healthy and entirely fit for duty—I decided I’m as qualified as anyone to say who might need to fill out an evaluation form at their friendly local mental health clinic.
 
I’m not, by the way, coming at this from as uninformed a position as the mayor has. I’ve done a cursory look around the psychiatric literature available on the Web, and found there are several mental illnesses that feature Franklin’s brand of blatant hypocrisy and her apparent feeling of being above reproach. And how else can one explain a mayor who unleashes the full fury of her authority on a police sergeant who comments that he’s sometimes so frustrated by the mayor’s failure to properly address the care of critically injured police officers that he would like to hit her in the head with a baseball bat? Especially when, according to a report in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution by the always impressive Bill Torpy, Franklin herself said of her ex-husband in 2002: “Do I talk to David Franklin? Yes. Do I know him? Yes. [But] I’m clearly on record that for my political career, I’d have been better off to shoot him than to divorce him.”
 
Now consider Franklin’s recent response to a citizen who asked her to accept Kreher’s apology and move on. The citizen signed his name as "Jeff" on an online petition to reinstate Kreher (you can find it at  HYPERLINK "http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/reinstatekreher/signatures.html" www.ipetitions.com/petition/reinstatekreher/signatures.html). 

Here’s Franklin’s response:
 
“Frankly, I believe threats of bodily harm from anyone are dangerous. As a 64-year-old woman I have witnessed violence resulting from anger that started with angry words. There is no excuse for threats of violence by anyone because they are upset. There are dozens of examples where this plays out around the world and thousands of women, men and children are killed and injured. To think an officer of the law has any right to be so upset he makes such a threat is to condone violence and encourage the disintegration of civil society. If he was that upset he should have stayed home and sought counseling. My response has no relationship to race, gender or ethnicity. Rather I believe his actions deserve strong and clear repudiation. I am ashamed that you condone threats and violence against anyone.”
 
Some domestic violence experts say that every year, 835,000 men are attacked by their girlfriends or wives, and they believe the true figure may actually be higher, since abused husbands are often too ashamed to tell anyone that their wives are battering them.
 
Let’s look at that Franklin quote again: “I’d have been better off to shoot him than to divorce him.”
 
Was Mayor Franklin making a real threat against her ex-husband? Of course not. Did she batter her husband? I would find that extremely hard to believe. As she told the AJC’s Torpy, the shooting remark was meant to express her frustration over the impact of her divorce on her political campaign.

Why then, does she find it so easy to excuse her own poor choice of words, and apparently impossible to accept the apology of a policeman who expressed his frustration though a similarly poor choice of words?

But Franklin took it even further. She had Kreher suspended, barring him from working extra jobs that he, like most Atlanta police officers, needs to support his family.
 
Is Franklin a narcissist?
 
Here’s a little info on narcissism from MayoClinic.com (emphasis mine):

“When you have narcissistic personality disorder … You have trouble handling anything that may be perceived as criticism. You may have a sense of secret shame and humiliation. And in order to make yourself feel better, you may react with rage or contempt and efforts to belittle the other person to make yourself appear better.”

It’s troubling that the most powerful political figure in the city of Atlanta is willing to go to great lengths to shame, defame and professionally damage her detractors in a bid to silence them. Her oversized reaction to critical remarks is frightening, considering that she has the power to order police officers onto the streets to do her bidding, order investigations of individuals, and even order psychological evaluations of city employees who stand up to her.

The City Council should, in the best interest of the citizens of Atlanta, as well as those who work and play in the city, order Mayor Franklin to undergo a psychological evaluation and suspend her, pending its results, just as Kreher was suspended. And, if the results merit it, ask for her resignation. SP

This column was modified from Stephanie Ramage’s June 10 entry on her Sundaypaper.com blog, The Ramage Report.