I have previously criticized psychiatrists who have regularly appeared on the air to identify a variety of mental illness that they have observed in President Donald Trump from afar. As I discussed in a prior column on the demise of the Goldwater rule, this is diagnosis without examination and often seems mixed with strong political judgments about Trump’s political positions. Bandy X. Lee, a professor of psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine, has been one of the most outspoken and last week urged House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to demand some ill-defined “hold” on the president pending psychiatric examination. Her position latest position is utterly bizarre but has been treated as a serious discussion point by some media like Salon magazine.
Lee previously served as the editor of the book “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President” and has continually argued for removal on the basis for mental illness. I previously discussed the difficulties in pursuing such loose analysis as the basis for removal under the 25th Amendment.
Lee’s most recent call for some form of intervention by Pelosi seems utterly disconnected from the constitutional process. She bizarrely treated this as an office intervention. Lee told Salon that “As a co-worker, she has the right to have him submit to an involuntary evaluation, but she has not. I am beginning to believe that a mental health hold, which we have tried to avoid, will become inevitable.”
I am at a loss on this one. Does Lee think that Pelosi can “as a co-worker” force the President into an involuntary evaluation? The only provision from incapacity of a president is found in the 25th Amendment and it omits such a workplace evaluation process. As I previously discussed, Section 4 has, essentially, two avenues for dragging a president from the Oval Office. First, there is the mutiny option. A vice president and a majority of the Cabinet can agree that the president is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office” and notify Congress that the vice president intends to take over. If Vice President Pence could get eight Cabinet officers to sign a letter to that effect, he would immediately become the “Acting President.” But if the president then declares to Congress that “no inability exists,” Trump could resume his powers.
Pence and the rebellious Cabinet would then have to send another declaration within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House that says, more or less, don’t believe a word, he’s unfit. Once Congress had the second declaration, if not already in session, it would have 48 hours to assemble to debate the issue. It would then have 21 days to vote on the president’s fitness. To remove the president, two-thirds of both houses would have to agree. If Congress did not vote within 21 days, the president would get his power back.
Notably, Lee again seems triggered by policies or actions with which she disagrees. This latest call for co-worker intervention was due to the killing of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani. I also raised concerns over this action as a possible assassination in violation of U.S. law and an act of war under international law. However, Trump is not the first president to attack individuals on foreign soil whether it was Osama Bin Laden or the attempt on former Libyan President Muammar el-Qaddafi.
Lee’s medical diagnosis is hard to untangle from her political judgment. She insists that this is “exactly what someone who lacks mental capacity would do.”:
“This is exactly the kind of dangerous event we foresaw as Donald Trump’s response to the impeachment proceedings, just as his pulling troops from northern Syria was a direct response to the announcement of an impeachment inquiry . . . In other words, he is extremely drawn to actions that would help him appear as if he has mental capacity, such as a ‘presidential strike’ against an enemy, while avoiding the proper procedures, such as briefing with Congress, that might expose his lack of capacity . . . What we do not expect from someone who lacks mental capacity is rational, reality-based decision making that is non-impulsive, non-reckless, and cognizant of consequences.”
She adds that his attacks on President Obama must also be treated as a reflection of his mental illness: “Since he is incapable of putting himself in another person’s shoes, he projects his own thoughts entirely onto others. Hence, we can deduce that what he has said about Mr. Obama has nothing to do with the former president but has only to do with the way he himself thinks.”
At points, Lee seems herself a bit adrift. When asked about the widespread criticism of her claims of mental illness, Lee responded “My critics do not have an argument. There are many situations where I hoped that my formulation would be wrong — but now that my hypotheses have been tested so many times to 100 percent precision.”
Really? She is 100 percent right without ever actually personally examining the subject.
Then the interview gets downright batty when the 25th Amendment is raised:
“Yes. In this country, no one is above the law, and as far as mental health laws and the president are concerned, there is no Office of Legal Counsel memo, no exceptions and at this time not even confidentiality, since he has yet to be a patient. Before it is a political matter involving impeachment or the 25th Amendment, it is a medical matter. The physical danger due to psychological impairment needs to be removed, and we are bound by our own professional code not to abandon persons or the public in danger. We are even legally bound to take steps to protect potential victims if warning is insufficient and security staff will not act. If the personal physician is unavailable or too conflicted to do so, any physician can.
A 72-hour hold does not require court intervention and is enough for a solid evaluation. There is no shortage of mental health professionals willing to put their names to commitment papers, and multiple legal groups have offered to file for a court order for security staff to cooperate. All we need are auspices so as to show it is not a coup or something nefarious — although, at this point, we may need to proceed anyway because the populace is growing too sick to see any intervention as legitimate unless it is illegitimate. This is common in mental health settings, and we apply the proper treatment according to standard anyway with the hope that patients will improve enough to see that you have helped them — which happens most of the time. It is this nature of mental disease that has allowed for civil commitment laws to be possible in a country that protects civil liberties.”
Could you imagine the future of our system if a Speaker of the House could have a president civilly committed for involuntary examination? Some Republicans would no doubt have asked Pelosi’s GOP predecessor for the same civil confinement of President Obama. We would need a regular presidential suite at St. Elizabeth’s. Lee herself shows the potential for securing favorable rulings from doctors who believe no sane person could hold certain political views or take certain actions.
It would be, in a word, madness.
Hmmm, where have I heard this schtick before? Oh yeah.
The old Soviet “psychopathological mechanisms” of dissent trick.
.
In his book Punitive Medicine (1979) Alexander Podrabinek defined the term “punitive medicine”, which is identified with “punitive psychiatry,” as “a tool in the struggle against dissidents who cannot be punished by legal means.”
Punitive psychiatry is neither a discrete subject nor a psychiatric specialty but, rather, it is an emergency arising within many applied sciences in totalitarian countries where members of a profession may feel themselves compelled to serve the diktats of power. Psychiatric confinement of sane people is uniformly considered a particularly pernicious form of repression and Soviet punitive psychiatry was one of the key weapons of both illegal and legal repression.
.
As Vladimir Bukovsky and Semyon Gluzmanwrote in their joint A Manual on Psychiatry for Dissenters, “the Soviet use of psychiatry as a punitive means is based upon the deliberate interpretation of dissent… as a psychiatric problem.”
You nailed it, we are getting a inside view of the type of minds that come up with the re-education camps, gulags and as you cited, punitive medicine…is our strength really embracing all ideas?
What quality of education are hyper politicized Yale and Harvard even worth, now? How badly have their reputations suffered after the scandal of buying admittance?
Is it even worth the exorbitant cost of an ivy league education if they have devolved to the point of Democrat madrassas skating by on their past glory days when they used to offer a fine education?
Why not just send their kids to Evergreen?
Apologies for my typo below. Metally healthy people don’t hide hush money payments to PORN stars. . . but it wouldn’t surprise me if this mentally unstable “genius” has made hush money payments to PORK stars as well.
This is why I don’t trust any proposed Red Flag laws. It’s obvious they would be abused. Trump, Hannity, Tucker, D’Souza, and any number of conservatives would instantly be flooded with Red Flag allegations.
Pity that adults behave this way.
It is a violation of ethical standards for a psychiatrist to make a diagnosis without personally examining a living person. This is well established.
Being an academic, a judge, or a psychiatrist is no shield to personal bias.
In the case of psychiatrists breaking professional standards to misdiagnose the President, they are abusing their position of authority for political gain…an increasingly common phenomenon.
Perhaps the only way to stop it is to put these psychiatrists’ licenses under review. After all, if they suffer political poisoning to this degree, their professional judgment and ethics are in question.
I do not think that Trump would be successful in suing for defamation. We have already seen that there are psychiatrists willing to risk it all to damage him. They would be eager to offer any diagnosis that would harm him should there be a trial.
This is wrong. Psychiatry is a useful field that has suffered regular waves of scandals – lobotomies, forced institutionalization of girls who snuck out at night, electroshock therapy, abuse, the implanted false memories of abuse that didn’t happen, Harry Harlow tormenting and ruining baby monkeys in the Pit of Despair, the refusal to admit for treatment and therefore put into NICS various school shooters, and the scuttling of Goldwater’s presidential aspirations on false allegations of mental illness. In addition, CA is overrun with the Walking Dead of mentally ill and drug addicted homeless, a problem that should be solved by a concerted effort of politicians and mental health professionals. Once psychiatric drugs came out, there was this idea that many mentally ill patients could transition from inpatient to outpatient care. That was one of the driving forces behind the push for community mental health care over centralized institutions in rural areas. It didn’t occur to these brilliant individuals that patients would refuse medication or care. They did. Decades later, they still do. And end up on the street.
Frankly, the field has a long history of abuse by practitioners. I think it’s time the field clean up its act.
Obama would have passed a mental evaluation and wouldn’t have hidden from it. Mentally healthy people don’t have to hide. They don’t hide their taxes. They don’t hide hush money payments to pork stars. They don’t hide the shatpie they used to doctor national weather maps. They don’t “hide” (fire) people who disagree with them. In my opinion anyone supporting this compulsive liar posing as our president should be mentally evaluated. Unless they are a cheater and liar themselves Of course. Them they should just HIDE.
See my post below.
You are correct about Obama, he would have passed any normalcy test..that’s the brilliance of hiding in plain sight.
Back in the 70s, a client/friend, a psychiatrist for the VA and a former Air Force medical officer, told me that most members of his professions are nuts and that they had the highest suicide rate of any profession. After dealing with psychiatrists and psychologists in my own family in the past, I have reached the conclusion that the “mental health” industry is the equivalent of the Seventeenth Century New England clergy. They have answers but don’t know the questions. They, like other professions, seek power over others. At least lawyers and historians have documents to examine to reach their conclusions. Mental health practitioners substitute their opinions for fact.
Psychiatrists are usually eccentric as hell. But they’ve been in school for a long time, and school weeds out the major dysfunctionals, so their behaviors have usually just considered eccentric rather than mental illness.
But what we can understand about the metadiagnostic method of the DSM itself, is that all mental illness is just personality quirks which causes behaviors that are “bad” and give rise to verbalized beliefs and actions that take a person outside social norms.
Now, I don’t think the DSM approach is wrong. It has a lot of good sense to it.
But what you can understand about it is that deep down,. mental illness is often just a question of perspective.
Understanding that, shrinks can articulate their “opinions” in a way that makes anybody seem crazy.
Shrinks have a very bad record of working as hired hands for industry, marketing, cia, the army, to say nothing of universities, in various nefarious things that do not serve the common good, and often are no better than glorified marketing experts who are cunning at twisting public perceptions
That’s what they’re up to here
I am married to a neurologist who tells me it’s against medical ethics for a physician to *armchair diagnose* especially someone who isn’t their patient. And I have to say Mr. Turley, David French disagrees with you that this was an assassination. In a war zone anyone who is an enemy or a threat can be killed. I didn’t hear any of this when UBL was killed. Obama was praised.
Uh, bear in mind that Iraq is no longer “a war zone’ and the United States is not at war with Iran. It was an assassination, just as the shoot down of the bomber carrying Admiral Yamamoto was an assassination. At least we were at war with Japan. As for David French, I gave up on him a long time ago. He’s a disgrace to the state of Tennessee and should be deported to New York.
Well it’s hard for these authoritarians to spend time on their own ethical failures when they have to spend 110% of their waking hours thinking about Trump’s.
I can only hope there are serious discussions by the secret service about intervention.
Reinforces my sense that an embarrassing number of people with psych degrees have a subconscious need for psychoanalysis themselves.
We’ve gone down the rabbit hole to visit Alice in Wonderland.
The President’s HHS secretary should have the appropriate agency audit her Ethic’s CE’s.
If only we could commit all those with TDS, the world would be a far more rational place! I wish Charles Krauthammer were her to respond!
Once again professor;
The left in all their various forms; political, academic, commercial have been driven mad by the reality that they missed the opportunity to transform America as Obama promised. Insult to injury it is being done by this person that they caricature as a buffoon. They now live in an unreality where they believe their own lies. Think about it. Only Donald Trump could have weathered the fusillade of bizarre but constant resistance. Should he succeed (I believe he will), history will regard him as a Churchillian leader.
Agree with the first part, not the second.
“Since he is incapable of putting himself in another person’s shoes,…”
Actually, I think Trump is perfectly capable of putting himself in another person’s shoes. Specifically, the shoes Obama was wearing when he droned American citizen’s in Yemen.
We need a mental health hold on the congenital liars of the Democrat Party. Schiff, Pelosi, Schumer, Nadlet, Swallwell, Brennan, McCabe, Comey, Waters, etc. These people have publically and continually lied and spread multiple conspiracy theories for the last 3 years. They are delusional and continue to lie in their effort to control the American public (see Orwell’s Animal Farm) . Then we should put a mental health hold on the Press, who has fallen in bed with these congenital liars acting as their mouthpiece. FInally, the Yale psychiatrist is threatening the President. She should lose her license and her position for spreading absurd conspiracy theories and threatening our President. These people are sick and have spent 3 years roaming the streets. It’s scary. Democrats have gotten downright vile in their assertions and its time to tell the truth about what they have done
Pelosi is already inadvertently putting a hold on insane Democrats SBG as she has put a hold on the Articles of Impeachment.
I do not see the Secret Service agreeing to this.
The head of the War Party division of the GOP IS sick, but not insane. He knows what he’s doing is wrong, but he’s sane enough to rationalize that it’s okay because…
The Bidens.
There could be an argument made as to whether or not her diagnosis constituted unprofessional conduct under the purview of her state’s department of health–in the sense that she was making unsubstantiated medical diagnosis without proper protocol observance and practice. Or, alternatively, that this was simply political commentary.
I remember some time ago reading about an example of the latter, but I do not remember the reference.
The fact that Dr. Lee is lending her professional opinion (not for the first time) to declare someone incapable of their job based not on personal observation, but biased newspaper accounts should itself lead to prompt action by her state licensing board. If she can do this to the President of the United States, she can do it to anyone. It needs to stop.
Yale considers itself above the licensing boards
A practice license in medicine related fields is not quite as sensitive a question as a law license, which is a franchise more aggressively protected by government.
The medical board licensing Dr. Lee should revoke her license for ethics violations. President Trump should sue her for defamation.
Lee is the one who should be committed. Lee, along with her fellow anti-trump so called medical experts, all simply hate Trump – her sickness is her hate for Trump. She should have your license revoked.
They don’t hate him. They are doing this hatchet job because somebody above them organized and commanded it.
Take a look at her organization’s speaker board. Reads like a “CIA veterans” list.
This is laying a foundation for a second term 25th amendment coup. Like Roger Stone warned us they would try.
Where’s Roger? Oh, he’s in jail. See how that works?
https://dangerouscase.org/
Ruth Ben-Ghiat – Leading Historian, Professor at New York University, and Expert on Fascism, Authoritarianism, War, and Propaganda
Gar Alperovitz – Leading Political Scientist, Founding Fellow of leading Policy Institutes, and former Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland
Philip Zimbardo – Leading Social Psychologist and Principal Investigator of the Stanford Prison Experiment
Joseph Romm – Leading Climate Expert, former Acting Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy, and Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress
Scott Ritter – Leading Nuclear Expert and former United Nations Weapons Inspector in Iraq
Jason Stanley – Leading Philosopher of Language and Epistemology and Professor at Yale University
David Cay Johnston – Pulitzer Prize-winning Investigative Journalist and Reporter on Worldwide Tax, Public Finance, and Business
Jamie Raskin – U.S. Representative for Maryland’s Eighth Congressional District
Mehdi Hasan – British Political Journalist and Broadcaster for Al Jazeera and the Intercept
Good Point with your reply to my post. The Powers to Be commanded it. Just imagine, if and when Trump is reelected, so far he is on track for reelection, what their reaction is going to be??????????
Watch they will try to draw up a 3rd article of impeachment with Trump’s actions against Iran.
It will never end, unless the Republicans can take back the House