Mental Health Professionals Agree - Trump is Dangerous.

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ASPartOfMe
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05 Jan 2020, 2:50 am

Yale psychiatrist urges 72-hour mental health hold on Trump after Iran attack

Quote:
A Yale psychiatrist who has warned of the dangers of President Donald Trump’s mental health for years urged House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to request a mental health hold of the president after he ordered a drone strike that killed a top Iranian general.

Bandy X. Lee, a professor of psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine, founded the World Mental Health Coalition after convening a conference at Yale on the president’s mental health. She is the editor of the book “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President” and more recently was joined by psychiatrists at universities around the U.S. in calling for the House of Representatives to convene a panel of mental health experts to weigh in on the president’s impeachment proceedings.

Lee recently told Salon that Pelosi has not done enough to respond to the president.

“As a co-worker, she has the right to have him submit to an involuntary evaluation, but she has not,” she said. “I am beginning to believe that a mental health hold, which we have tried to avoid, will become inevitable.”

Lee told Salon this week that the president’s decision to order the drone killing of a top Iranian general was further evidence that Pelosi should do more to rein in Trump.

“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,” Lee told Salon. “This was why more than 800 mental health professionals petitioned Congress to consult with us, since, without intervention, this kind of crisis was a matter of time, not just a possibility.”

Lee said Trump’s actions were “exactly what someone who lacks mental capacity would do.”

“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,” she said. “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.”

Lee also noted that Trump had repeatedly accused former President Barack Obama of planning to attack Iran in order to help his re-election.

“Since he is incapable of putting himself in another person’s shoes, he projects his own thoughts entirely onto others,” she said. “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.”

Lee’s comments that Pelosi has the right to request a mental health hold of Trump have drawn criticism. Lee spoke to Salon this week about her comments and doubled down on her call for Pelosi to submit Trump for an “involuntary evaluation.” The transcript that follows has been edited for length and clarity.

You recently told Salon that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi can request an involuntary mental health examination of President Trump, which prompted a lot of questions. Can you clarify what you meant and what that would look like? How might the president respond?
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, we would be remiss to ignore the certainty. Psychological dangerousness is the only criterion we need, and I hope now that even ordinary people will see that the Syrian and Iraqi examples are psychological, not political, responses and not the result of a productive strategy!

What would an involuntary evaluation look like? We have to apply the same principles to an unprecedented situation, not rely on “this looks different than what I am used to seeing.” In the case of family, members can call 911; in the case of a president, citizens could draw up a demand. Numerous citizens have approached me about this since our last interview, and I have recommended a petition. If millions sign, it cannot be ignored. As a mental health professional who could be called in to evaluate, I cannot start it, but any citizen can. Citizens, as the president’s employers, are acceptable auspices, especially if Congress or other governmental bodies are not acting.

Is there a constitutional provision for this?
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.

Under this scenario, what would stop lawmakers or even voters from trying to have their opponents involuntarily evaluated?

This is the great misconception that has stemmed from a lack of education of the public. Psychiatry is a science that is evidence- and fact-based, just like the rest of medicine. If we leave everything to politics alone, without grounding in evidence, facts, science and established expertise, it becomes an area where anything goes and everything is up for grabs. We should serve as a buffer against this, not as an agent of the state, the way the American Psychiatric Association has acted.

Do you think presidential candidates should be required to undergo some sort of mental health assessment to prevent potentially dangerous individuals from taking office in the first place?

Absolutely — this is what we have been advocating from the start! Every military officer, and particularly those handling nuclear weapons, is subject to a mental health screen before they take their positions. Their commander in chief should at least be held to the same standards. Implementing mental health screens would, in fact, eliminate most of the atrocities in history that have befallen nations because of a compromised leader. We have set up a non-governmental, independent expert panel with rigorous criteria that is ready to do fitness-for-duty tests of presidential and vice-presidential candidates, as well as the current president, any time we are called.

Why haven’t more professionals spoken out about this?

I hold the American Psychiatric Association responsible for this, and I have criticized it from the moment I recognized what was happening. By choosing to protect a powerful political figure over society, it not only stigmatized an entire field through the secrecy and strangeness it imposed, but I believe it has doomed itself to infamy for refusing to act on perhaps the greatest mental health crisis possible, unless it corrects itself — not to mention stopping individual professionals from fulfilling their own professional responsibility through public campaigns. I am in active protest until it publicly recants its actions.

Pretending that something does not exist — not just mental compromise in the president, but mental health issues in general — disarms and victimizes us, while giving our enemies the chance to take advantage. It also abandons those who are suffering from the very serious problem of mental illness, and may hurt them by encouraging the conflation of dangerousness with mental illness.


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RetroGamer87
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07 Jan 2020, 5:48 am

So Trump has mental health problems just because he wants to start and endless war that will create endless profits for his friends in the military-industrial complex?

No. That's not insanity, that's greed.


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The_Walrus
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07 Jan 2020, 6:31 am

I really don’t like either the attempts to equate mental illness with badness, or the armchair psychiatrists who pop up, and I don’t think much of actual psychiatrists who encourage and facilitate those things.



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07 Jan 2020, 10:42 am

Well sir, I don't think much of Mr. Trump either. In this instance, its the varmints going after the low-hanging fruit.


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The_Walrus
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07 Jan 2020, 11:47 am

I don’t think I’m being especially controversial when I say that somebody being “bad” doesn’t mean we should abandon our personal standards when dealing with them. I don’t think that Putin should be imprisoned without trial, killed, or tortured, for example. I don’t think it is acceptable to make racist jokes about Xi Jiping just because he’s a racist himself. And I don’t think it’s acceptable for people other than mental health professionals working with Trump, or his attorney (in the “lasting power of” sense), or the cabinet, to claim that his mental health makes him unfit for office.

You can criticise Trump for his poor decision making, his impulsiveness, his lack of a moral code, his poor planning, his racism, his transphobia, and at this point I can’t remember all the stupid stuff he’s done. But criticising him for his mental health seems 1) unfair on him, 2) to shift the spotlight away from the sh***y things he’s done and his sh***y values, and 3) to throw mentally ill people under the bus by tarring them by association with Trump.

The issues with Trump are his values and actions. Everything else, one way or another, is secondary.



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08 Jan 2020, 9:14 am

Unfortunately, sir, we members can only address the secondary issues, since the Media already criticizes Trump for his poor decision making, his impulsiveness, his lack of a moral code, his poor planning, his racism, his trans-phobia, and all the other stupid stuff he’s done.

However, the Media also covers professional opinions on Trump's overall mental health, to wit:


Mental health professionals from Harvard, the Air Force and more reflect on the meaning of the Soleimani assassination.

"... As predicted by leading mental health professionals several years ago, Donald Trump’s emotional and psychological collapse continues unabated. In his third year in office, the president has demonstrated through his public and private behavior that he is mentally unwell. The pressures of the impeachment process have only worsened Trump’s condition.  There will be no bottom. Trump’s mental decompensation and associated downward spiral will only get worse.  This is both a national and global crisis.

The newest low point in Donald Trump’s behavior arrived last Friday when he ordered the assassination of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani ... pretexts are either verifiably untrue or implausible. Donald Trump apparently ordered the assassination of Soleimani -- and the escalation to a de facto state of war between Iran and the U.S. -- because he was afraid of looking 'weak'...

As a malignant narcissist, when threatened, Trump must reassert his dominance over the world at all costs. And to a sadistic psychopath (one component of malignant narcissism), the collateral damage is not a cost but a bonus.  As I said in 2018: 'He has no empathy or concern for anybody but himself and so he will not care about the destruction that it will cause other people. In fact, because of his sadism, there’s a part of him that perversely seems to revel in causing chaos and destruction and making us all frightened all the time, but even more importantly, it will be irresistible for him because it will transform him from feeling like a hunted victim of this witch hunt to feeling like an omnipotently destructive victor'..."


The author of this piece is one
Chauncey DeVega, who admits on his website that "Fox News, Breitbart, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Juan Williams, Herman Cain, Alex Jones, World Net Daily, Twitchy, the Free Republic, the National Review, NewsBusters, the Media Research Council, Project 21, and Weasel Zippers have made it known that they do not like me very much."

At least he is an honest reporter, unlike those others he mentioned.


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