Trump’s Mental Health
About this book
“What you have accomplished is really therapeutic for those who receive the message, all around the world. Thank you so much for not letting others stop you in your eorts of communication.” – A member of the public, from Switzerland In April 2017, Yale psychiatrist Dr. Bandy X. Lee held an ethics conference by the title, “Does Professional Responsibility Include a Duty to Warn?” The conference drew national attention and led to the New York Times bestseller, The Dangerous Case of Donald 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. She was joined by thousands of mental health professionals from around the country and then the world, hence forming the World Mental Health Coalition. These were historic events. Congress members reached out and asked her to “do your part so that we could do ours”: namely, that she and her colleagues educate the public from a medical perspective so that they could take action from the political domain. Lee and colleagues were successful in raising the issue to become the number one topic of national conversation, and the whole country was hopeful. Then, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) stepped in, and within weeks all discussion with the press came to a halt. Less than two months into the Trump presidency, the APA had turned “the Goldwater rule,” a guideline intended to protect public health into a silencing mechanism that would protect a political figure at the expense of public health. The APA refused any discussions internally but went on campaigns publicly to shut down those who would speak up. Now, it seems only the forerunner of institutions that would behave this way under this administration, including the Department of Justice. Lee has persisted undaunted. From her invited op-eds for the Guardian, Politico, the Boston Globe, and the New York Daily News, to her interviews on CNN, Democracy Now! and Salon, this collection of her expert opinion reads like a historic narrative of a national mental health crisis. With the realization that 70 to 99 percent of deaths from a viral pandemic, the worst economic devastation since the Great Depression, and a potentially looming collapse of democracy are all attributable to one man’s mental compromise, the public has never stopped clamoring for mental health expertise. Authoritarianism rises where authoritative voices—the Free Press and access to experts—diminish. This collection of Lee’s op-eds and interviews is a small antidote.