A Yale psychology professor who has made a name for herself by claiming Donald Trump and his supporters are mentally unsound now wants the president locked up.
Bandy X. Lee claimed in a Salon report that “from his behavior alone, he meets criteria for a locked psychiatric facility.”
“Past violence often leads to future violence, and we now have a person who has committed mass killings, recklessly endangering life, if not engaging in negligent homicide,” she said.
Salon pointed out that Lee was assuming that the 200,000 recorded U.S. deaths from the Wuhan coronavirus were because of “Trump’s negligence.”
Noting the president took off his mask while standing alone on the White House balcony after his return from treatment at Walter Reed hospital, she said it “would not be an exaggeration” to say that Trump “delights in putting people in danger.”
“Sociopathy is dangerous, in part because out of envy of other human beings for having human characteristics, it actively desires people to suffer and die,” she said.
Lee is the editor of “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.”
She also is president of the World Mental Health Coalition, which features “100 mental health experts” who contend Trump shouldn’t be president.
They claim he is “dangerous and unfit.”
The health professionals insist their comments are not an actual diagnosis of a person, since medical association ethical codes discourage doctors from discussing or diagnosing people they have not met in person.
In fact, the American Psychological Association maintains the “Goldwater Rule,” which was a result of an attempt by mental health practitioners to disparage Barry Goldwater’s mental health during the 1964 presidential campaign.
The rule states: “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.”
Authoritarian regimes such as the Soviet Union fine-tuned the political weaponization of psychiatry, confining many dissidents of sound mind to insane asylums for “involuntary evaluations” because of their political opposition.
Lee said she is not bound to such ethical standards because the APA misapplied “The Goldwater Rule.”
“We are bound by our professional responsibility to society by the Geneva Declaration and the core tenets of medical ethics,” she said.
Lee told Salon she’s treated “probably” 1,000 individuals with Trump’s “exact characteristics.”
She also said she still believes it’s possible that the president’s trip to Walter Reed hospital with coronavirus was because of “malingering, or feigning illness.”
She went on with her attack on the president and his supporters.
“What people need to understand about many of his followers is that in their need for a parental figure who will take care of them, his position alone justifies whatever he does, and any exposure of his fraudulence and criminality will be experienced as an existential threat to them, which is why it only activates defensive denial, disavowal and protection of their ‘protector,'” she said.
“Violence, paranoia and delusions are also particularly contagious, and so having someone with these symptoms in an influential position is almost a setup for propagation of these traits — what I have been calling ‘shared psychosis’ but which others have also called ‘folie à millions,’ or madness by the millions. This contagion of symptoms dissipates when exposure to the primary person is reduced. We already saw this happen when he was temporarily unable to hold rallies at the onset of the pandemic.”
Reason reported in January that Lee suggested Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz suffers “from the same mental disorder” as the president.
She said “just about all of Donald Trump’s followers” are caught up in a “shared psychosis” that somehow she can see.
Dershowitz had drawn the attack by noting that “Lee’s habit of bludgeoning her opponents with the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) flies in the face of the APA’s Goldwater Rule.”
Reason said Lee “does not hesitate to use her position and psychiatric expertise to stigmatize people who disagree with her.”
WND reported Lee said Trump supporters are like “child soldiers” who easily could turn into “armed troops in the streets” if the president doesn’t win re-election in the fall.
She previously urged House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to request an involuntary 72-hour psychiatric hold of the president.
But Lee has failed to provide a similar analysis of Joe Biden. Summit News reported Norwegian psychiatrist Fred Heggen assessed that Biden is suffering from dementia.
Heggen, the medical director at an Oslo clinic, said at the time: “Of course I may still judge him wrongly, but in my eyes he appears as a person who is already very affected by dementia. And the presidential election is still far ahead. What if his condition worsens further over the next two-three months?”
