Tag: Yale psychiatrist

Trump’s ‘American Führer’ fantasy: Yale psychiatrist says the president’s ‘displays of false strength’ foreshadow plan to question election results

AlterNet logoA Yale psychiatrist who has repeatedly sounded the alarm on President Donald Trump’s mental health warned that his “displays of false strength” foreshadow his reaction to the November election if he loses.

Dr. Bandy X. Lee is a forensic psychiatrist at Yale School of Medicine, author of the textbook “Violence,” and editor of “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.” Lee, who heads the World Mental Health Coalition, focuses on public health approaches to violence prevention and has led various think tanks that seek to “draw connections between individual, community, and societal violence, as they are interrelated.”

Lee spoke to Salon after Trump threat this week to deploy the U.S. military onto American streets to quell protests and staged a photo-op in front of a church after federal forces stormed peaceful protesters outside the White House.

Yale psychiatrist: There’s a madman in the White House

AlterNet logo“You nailed him!” is the typical response I received on Twitter, the forum I have been using to reach out to the public, after the assassination of Iran’s top general, Qassim Suleimani.  My audience was referring to the concerns I had regarding Donald Trump leading up to the act of aggression, which is precisely the psychological danger I warned against, along with more than 800 other mental health professionals who joined me in petitioning Congress to consult with us about this danger.

Militarily and legally, no accusation of the president can or should be made without definitive proof.  Psychologically, however, one is capable of generating a “formulation” of a person, testing it against data, as in a scientific experiment, and confirming it before events happen.  When it is strengthened over time through continual information and repeatedly tested against real events, it sharpens to great precision, and one can begin anticipating behavior.  Before there is a “wag the dog” maneuver to distract or to rally support, there is the thought.  It feels uncanny, indeed, to have such a grasp on someone so as to be able to predict just the kind of military move he would make within approximately 12 hours of his making it—so much so that, when DC Report asked me to do an analysis of Rudy Giuliani 24 hours earlier, I complained: “But … Donald Trump is about to erupt in Iran!”

The afflicted person, outraged at the deprivation of the adulation to which one feels entitled, becomes blind to other concerns such as the safety of others or the self.

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