America
might not be able to save itself
This week, President Donald Trump
attacked Democrats for conducting investigations into potential misdeed by the
Trump campaign and administration.
“The greatest overreach in the
history of our Country,” Trump tweeted. “The Dems are obstructing justice and
will not get anything done. A big, fat, fishing expedition desperately in
search of a crime, when in fact the real crime is what the Dems are doing, and
have done!”
“PRESIDENTIAL HARASSMENT!” he added.
The attack on Democrats echoed his
rambling speech at CPAC over the weekend, in which the President accused
Clinton foundation staffers of being killers.
Raw Story spoke with Yale
psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee about the President’s recent outbursts.
Lee is a forensic psychiatrist at
Yale School of Medicine who teaches at Yale Law School. She edited the New York
Times bestseller, “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and
Mental Health Experts Assess a President,” to be released in an expanded
edition later this month.
She is president of the World Mental Health Coalition
and currently organizing an interdisciplinary conference with top experts of
multiple fields from around the country, to happen in Washington, DC, on the
date of the book’s launch.
Raw Story: President Trump’s
CPAC speech seems to have brought his mental health back into the spotlight
over the weekend. Lawrence O’Donnell even quoted from your book the other
night. What are your thoughts about the speech?
Bandy X. Lee: A member of the public
asked, “When Donald Trump wrapped his arms around the flag, it evoked Lennie
from Of Mice and Men squeezing the mouse until it’s dead. Is the president
going to destroy our country?”
I didn’t tell her this, but my answer
would have been that he is well on the way, as long as we let him.
How are we
letting him? By colluding on the most basic point: by telling ourselves that
the mental unwellness we see is not what we are seeing.
Allowing him to give as
long a speech as he did, allowing him to continue on Twitter, allowing him to
remain in his position, and allowing his staff to turn over so that he has no
one left but those who enable his illness—all this is the opposite of the
proper treatment that he needs.
Containment and removal from access
to weapons, urgent evaluation, and then the least restrictive means of
management based on the evaluation, is the medical standard of care.
Even the president deserves medical
standard of care, and he is not getting it. The natural course of disease is
that it will engulf the afflicted persons and lead them to destruction, if left
without resistance.
I have a colleague at the World
Health Organization, Dr. Gary Slutkin, who approaches this human
destructiveness as an infectious disease.
If we do not treat this phenomenon as
an affliction of the mind, a symptom, but rather as a political strategy or an
otherwise “normal” process, then we will surely lose.
Think about not
containing an Ebola infection and allowing it to spread freely; the image may be
horrifying, and yet we are dealing here with something much more dangerous than
Ebola.
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Raw Story: How do you tell
disease apart from healthy choices?
Bandy X. Lee: Often it takes a
specialist with a lot of experience to make the distinction, since disorders
are usually not entirely new but are extremes of traits that many people
normally have. You have to know to what degree that constitutes pathology.
You also have to know a little bit
about what the different diseases look like. A cancer cell, on its own, looks
very healthy and is very efficient in sucking up all the nutrients around it
and reproducing rapidly—it looks like success, but it eventually depletes the
organism supporting it and brings everything down, including itself.
Raw Story: Trump tweeted, “The
Dems are obstructing justice and will not get anything done. A big, fat,
fishing expedition desperately in search of a crime, when in fact the real
crime is what the Dems are doing, and have done!” He calls it “PRESIDENTIAL
HARASSMENT.” What do you make of his words?
Bandy X. Lee: In mental disease, a
useful clue is the level to which the person denies any possibility that
something could be wrong with oneself. If one denies it vehemently, then that
is already a clue.
After a certain point, you start using the formula of taking
the opposite of what the person is saying to be true, and taking all assertions
to be projection—and by now I have more high-quality data on Mr. Trump than any
patient I have ever treated.
So what he is really saying is: “I will obstruct
justice, since it looks like they are getting a lot done. I’m on a big, fat
fishing expedition in search of a way out of this, since I know the real crime
is what I am doing, and have done.”
You can test this method elsewhere:
when he says he believes President Barack Obama “was ready to go to war….
Anybody else but me, you’d be in war right now,” you can interpret it as his
saying he is ready to go to war and that we are likely soon to be in a war like
nobody else but he would incite.
When he calls Democrats “angry,
angry people…. All killers,” he is giving us information that he is an angry,
angry person who is akin to being a killer.
So when mental health professionals
come out with assessments about the president’s dangerousness or mental
impairment, we are not trying to call him names but applying scientifically
validated formulations that make revelations about him, such as chaos in the
White House, very unsurprising.
Seasoned professionals knew it all
from the start. This is why the law in all 50 states gives us the right to
contain someone who presents enough psychological evidence to be a danger,
whereas law enforcement can only do so after something has happened.
This past week was symbolic of two
of the greatest dangers of this presidency: those of nuclear war and of civil
war.
We cannot expect a leader who is highly attracted to nuclear weapons and
war to continue efforts toward peace when they do not bring him distraction or
accolades, and when his former fixer Michael Cohen said there may never be a
peaceful transition were Mr. Trump to lose in 2020, I cannot say I disagree.
Raw Story: What can we do?
Bandy X. Lee: We really need to
begin with a proper evaluation. Medical evaluations and legal investigations
have a lot in common, as I have learned from teaching at a law school for over
15 years.
You gather evidence to support each of your statements, make use of
precedent for your current evaluation (in medicine, this is scientific research
and observation over multiple similar cases), and dispense the right treatment
based on your discoveries.
This is our grounding in reality,
and the reason why Congress, it seems to me, is focusing heavily on the special
counsel’s investigations, even though you do not need criminal indictment to
proceed with impeachment, for example.
Similarly, Section 4 of the 25th
Amendment may not need a medical finding to be implemented, but medical
evidence is what grounds it in reality and keeps it from becoming a purely
partisan game.
Medical professional opinion is
admissible in court as evidence; in other words, it has the status of fact. A
former White House counsel told me that “Capacity” should be up there with
“Corruption” and “Collusion”, and I thought that was a very astute observation.
Just as there is the Robert Mueller investigation, there should be an
evaluation of the president’s mental capacity. Yet, Mr. Trump’s new White House
doctor, with his “11 different Board certified specialists,” did no valid
mental health assessment.
The American Psychiatric
Association—which I criticize often because the public needs to know what
information it is being depriving of—confounded “professional opinion” (a
diagnosis) with “any opinion of a professional,” blocking a whole profession
from saying a word about this president (the rule used to prohibit only
diagnosis).
Even the New York Times selectively published a handful of
psychiatrists willing to say that the president is “just a jerk” or “does not
have narcissistic personality disorder” or that psychiatrists have nothing to
offer—and they are all connected to the APA.
In fact, the whole Editorial Board
came out with a statement early last year that mental health professionals have
nothing to offer about the president—without being an expert, how do they know
the limits of the expertise?
The ethics of being an expert is first to state
the limits of your knowledge—it is not for a newspaper to say. This is actually
egregious, and I equate it to the moment when the paper failed to warn against
Nazism by burying reports about it.
Clinical psychologist Elizabeth Mika
describes tyranny as a “beast” that encroaches on us as a steady creep until it
is too late.
Our public-service book, to which
she contributed, had three warnings: that the president’s condition was worse
than it seemed, that it would grow worse over time—either power granted to
illness or frustration of that will to power will do that—and that he would
eventually be uncontainable.
We are beginning to enter the third stage, and
what I meant by it was that his pathology would spread, through his influential
position, so that the country would become no longer able to save itself.
When
a clinician has a patient who is growing psychotic—that is, losing touch with
reality—the clinician examines what is called “reality testing.” If a patient
can no longer look at facts and reality and adjust his perceptions and beliefs
accordingly, then you worry about the patient literally becoming unhinged from
reality.
At that point, the person will run as far from evaluation and
treatment as possible, and healing can only come from outside intervention. The
growing conspiracy theories, false “news”, and the refusal to accept facts and
expertise should worry us all—every day we are falling more deeply into it, and
2020 may be too late for us to recover.
