Newsletter: The Duty to Warn and the Dangerousness of Trump
With Forensic Psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee
Dr. Bandy X. Lee believes in her duty to warn the public; that was why she called together 37 experts in the field of psychology and psychiatry to discuss the clear warning signs they observed in the behavior of Donald Trump, in the book she edited, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.
Now, as she announces a second book, The More Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Warn Anew, I have updated the blog post and reshared the podcast and video interview from last year where we discussed her book, her duty to warn the public, and the consequences she faced as a result of her speaking out.
To underline her prescient warning, we’ve gathered all the blog posts I’ve made with her. Scroll down for these and more.
The November 2024 election will determine the future of America and the free world. Conservative attorney George Conway has created the Anti-Psychopath PAC and has publicly called out the media’s failure to explain the dangers of having a psychopath in the White House. One of the leading experts who has been trying to say this for years but has been silenced is Bandy X. Lee, M.D., M.Div., a forensic psychiatrist, president of the World Mental Health Coalition, and an internationally recognized expert on violence. A brilliant and compassionate observer of the political landscape, she is the author of Profile of a Nation: Trump’s Mind, America’s Soul and editor of the best-selling book The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. She is assembling a team of authors to create a new, short book published by the World Mental Health Coalition and tentatively titled The More Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Warn Anew.
Read the blog post, or listen to the podcast:
When Donald Trump was elected in 2016, many voices were raised predicting the damage to our democratic way of life that a leader with his psychological disposition would do. Chief among these voices was a group of psychiatrists and other mental health professionals who wrote the in-depth and scientifically based book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.
Dr. Bandy Lee, a forensic psychiatrist on the faculty at the Yale School of Medicine and an expert on violence prevention, graciously accepted my invitation to speak at the Program in Psychiatry and the Law, a forensic think tank.
During her talk, she gives a personal account of how she came to publicly warn, along with other eminent experts, against the psychological dangerousness of President Trump. Dr. Lee discusses how there was a serious concern in the medical community over indicators of his mental instability.
January 27, 2019, Dr. Bandy Lee and Dr. James Gilligan spoke at The Program in Psychiatry and the Law (the Harvard forensic think tank). The talk was entitled, “Do we surrender our moral compass to technical rule?” They further discuss the question, “Given our professional responsibility to society, if we see dangers to public health and wellbeing, should we refrain from speaking up in professional ways because of a technical rule?” Dr. Lee and Dr. Gilligan are both experts on violence.
In a tragic case of a “family cult,” in Lake County Florida, four people are dead and two wounded following a standoff with police. From the stockpiling of weapons to a conspiracy theory involving suspecting the neighbors of horrific crimes, it was a puzzling and terrifying situation. Channel 35 of Orlando asked me to weigh in on the case, and I was glad to give my perspective.
Image credit Georgia Guercio Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0
As always, please let us know what you think about these pieces or what you’d like to see us discuss in the future. Thanks so much!
