A Manhattan psychotherapist says an alarming number of Americans are experiencing a “mental health epidemic” driven by an obsessive fixation on President Donald Trump — a condition widely mocked as “Trump Derangement Syndrome” but which he argues is now disrupting daily life on a broad scale.

Speaking Sunday on Fox News’ The Sunday Briefing, psychotherapist Jonathan Alpert told host Peter Doocy that although “TDS” is not a clinically recognized diagnosis, the patterns he has seen in nearly a decade of sessions are impossible to ignore.

“I am deeply, deeply concerned about what I’ve been seeing… for almost 10 years now,” Alpert said.

The term “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” frequently used by Trump and his supporters, typically refers to people they believe are irrationally consumed by the president’s every word and action. But Alpert says the reality is more serious — and more widespread — than a political insult.

Alpert described patients struggling with anxiety, anger, and insomnia – symptoms he says mimic those of other diagnosed disorders. For some, he said, the fixation on Trump has reached levels that interfere with routine life.

“We see great division in families and friendships broken up over how strongly they feel about Trump,” he said. “People are anxious, they’re angry, they can’t sleep. One person even said she couldn’t possibly enjoy a family vacation as long as Trump is out there.”

These are, he stressed, “hallmark features of any disorder that I treat every day of the week,” and therefore warrant serious concern.

Alpert said that heightened emotions around political figures are nothing new, but the scale of obsession around Trump is unprecedented in his practice.

“I had patients who hated Joe Biden, but it never rose to the point where they wanted him dead or would stay up at night obsessing over Joe Biden the way they do over Trump,” he said.

The difference, he argued, is the level at which Trump “dominates” people’s inner lives, often consuming “three-quarters” of a therapy session. That, he said, crosses the threshold from political disagreement into pathology.

Alpert warned that the phenomenon has escalated to the point where it has become, in his view, one of the most significant mental health issues of the past decade.

“I would even go so far as to call this a mental health epidemic,” he said. “In some ways, it’s the defining pathology of the past decade.”

His therapeutic approach, he said, is to steer patients back to reality, helping them distinguish “what’s fact and what isn’t.”

“If you think Trump is going to round up the gays and send them off to an island, or if you think Trump is a Nazi — these things are not proven,” Alpert said. “They’re not fact at all.”

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)