Yale psychiatry prof: Pelosi should order Trump into 'involuntary evaluation'

Bandy Lee

Yale psychiatry professor Bandy Lee, who long ago who created a campaign to diagnose President Donald Trump by long-distance, while randomly lashing out with accusations about his mental health, is back.

Now Lee wants House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to order the president into an "involuntary evaluation."

Lee was one of a team of leftists who months ago volunteered to advise Democrats that Trump is not qualified to be president.

At the time, Lee released a statement attacking the president: "We think that hearing about mental health aspects in the context of the impeachment hearings is critical, partly because, for the past 2.5 years we have been very deeply concerned about mental instability of the president, and pretty much all that we have said has born (sic) out to be true," wrote Lee at the time.

Now, in an interview with Salon, Lee has raised the prospect of ordering the president into an evaluation for force, in fact, an "involuntary evaluation."

Pelosi, Lee claimed, "has the right" to force Trump into such a review.

"I am beginning to believe that a mental health hold . . . will become inevitable," Lee told the publication.

Lee, on the staff at Yale School of Medicine, started making long-distance diagnostic accusations about the president even before he was elected.

Later came Lee's work on a book called "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump."

In it, various "mental health experts" give their opinions, all negative, on the 45th president.

"As a coworker, she [Pelosi] has the right to have him submit to an involuntary evaluation, but she has not," Lee claimed in the Salon interview. "Anyone can call 911 to report someone who seems dangerous, and family members are the most typical ones to do so. But so can coworkers, and even passersby on the street. The law dictates who can determine right to treatment, or civil commitment, and in all 50 U.S. states this includes a psychiatrist."

The psychiatrist intent on involuntarily removing Trump from office continued, "The advantage of a coworker starting this process is that a court can mandate a mental capacity evaluation before the dangerous person returns to work. The committing physician is preferably the patient's treater, but does not have to be."

Lee was among those who earlier volunteered to abrogate medical association ethics codes that discourage or even ban doctors from discussing or diagnosing people they have not met with personally by continuing to publicly rant about the president.

In fact, the American Psychological Association maintains the "Goldwater Rule," which came about as a result of an attempt by various mental health practitioners to disparage Barry Goldwater's mental health during the 1964 presidential campaign.

It explains, "On occasion psychiatrists are asked for an opinion about an individual who is in the light of public attention or who has disclosed information about himself/herself through public media. In such circumstances, a psychiatrist may share with the public his or her expertise about psychiatric issues in general. However, it is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement."

It was actually repressive governments like the Soviet Union that fine-tuned the political weaponization of psychiatry , with many dissidents of perfectly sound mind being confined in insane asylums for "involuntary evaluations" because of their political disagreements with the communists in power.

Today's long-distance psychiatric diagnoses of President Trump, in violation of the Goldwater Rule, are based on the "president's public appearances, tweets, interviews, and also from special counsel Robert Mueller's 448-page report," says Lee.

Lee led a previous group of mental health experts to analyze the president, but after Trump did not respond to their request for an exam, they "concluded Trump does not have the sound mental capacity to function in his role as president and recommended Trump lose his war powers and access to nuclear weapons."

Trump, insists Lee, is actually getting more dangerous by the day.

"I am beginning to believe that a mental health hold, which we have tried to avoid, will become inevitable," Lee said.

Pelosi is failing at her job, Lee adds: "As a coworker, she has the right to have him submit to an involuntary evaluation, but she has not. There is also the common mistake to think that mental impairment and criminality are mutually exclusive, when they have nothing to do with each other, but happening in the same person can cause much greater danger," Lee said.