A Psychiatrist Warned Us About Trump and The Potential For Violence in His Name

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An article by Joshua Kendall in the September-October 2022 issue of Mother Jones is worth the read. He discusses the work of Bandy Lee, who has spent much of her professional life treating violent offenders in prison.

Dr. Lee spoke of her concerns about Trump in The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump back in 2017 and was censured by the American Psychiatric Association for violating the Goldwater Rule which cautions against diagnosis of public figures that a given professional has not personally examined.

Below is an excerpt from Kendall's article:


'Since 1900, every time a Republican president has taken over, economic inequality has increased and the country has become more violent,' says Gilligan, now a professor of psychiatry at NYU. And as the government safety net has crumbled in recent decades, rates of murder, imprisonment, and poverty have been five to 10 times higher in the United States than in Western Europe, Canada, and Australasia. Lee and Gilligan had to circulate their data-driven paper on the political correlates of violent death rates for nearly seven years before they finally got it published in 2014 in a specialized journal, Aggression and Violent Behavior. 'My sense is that our study kept getting rejected not because it was lousy science but because editors wanted to avoid appearing too political,' she says."

The excerpt above includes a statement from another person who has worked with Dr. Lee's. The article in Mother Jones notes that the book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, which is a compilation of papers written by numerous mental health professionals, was a best seller.

[NNadir]

1. I have the book out of the library but haven't found a minute even to start it.