“We assumed that our effort was a failure until we saw the press coverage, which included write-ups in news outlets in different countries.” She proceeded to solicit papers on Trump’s potential for violence from a couple dozen other mental health experts and published the entire collection that fall. On the day of the conference, when only two dozen people filed into the 450-seat auditorium, the speakers-who also included clinical psychiatry professor Judith Herman from Harvard Medical School, and New York University psychiatrist James Gilligan, who also specializes in violent behavior-were “disappointed,” Lee says. Their consensus was, as Lifton put it, that psychiatric professionals had a compelling ethical duty to “bring our experience and knowledge to bear on what threatens us and what might renew us.” The event was initially sponsored by Yale’s schools of public health, medicine, and nursing, but Lee ended up running it independently to avoid the perception of “politicization.” Titled “Does Professional Responsibility Include a Duty to Warn?” the meeting featured a handful of prominent psychiatrists, including Robert Jay Lifton, author of The Nazi Doctors (1986), who addressed Trump’s mental state and the risks they believed it posed to the health and safety of Americans. She decided to jump into the fray, organizing an academic conference that took place in New Haven the following April. “Can you do something?” Violent themes were becoming a staple of Republican campaign rhetoric well before the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago search unleashed a fresh torrent of inciteful messaging. Would Trump’s victory herald an increase in hate crimes? “You are a violence expert,” one implored. Lee’s friends and colleagues were bombarding her with calls and emails. Like Trump, these leaders also often project extreme self-confidence, and that appeals to their followers, who tend to feel a deep emotional need for protection, connection, and identity.”įast forward to November 9, 2016, the day after the election. “Trump was engaging in the predatory manipulation of his vulnerable followers.” In some cases, gang leaders might “ask their members to engage in violence and then issue bogus promises of protection. A native New Yorker, she had assumed that Trump “was just a shady businessman,” Lee told me, but “I suddenly realized that he had a lot in common” with those patients. As part of her clinical work in prison settings, she had evaluated and treated hundreds of violent offenders, including leaders of prison gangs. His belligerent behavior meant more to Lee than it might to a casual viewer. “He said something about how his supporters should knock the crap out of hecklers,” she recalls, “and that if they did, he would pay their legal bills.” What shocked her was the way Trump interacted with the crowd. An assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Yale, Lee had been too preoccupied with her mother’s condition to pay attention to the nascent presidential race, so she was taken aback when she saw footage of a Donald Trump rally airing on the hospital room’s small TV. On the afternoon of February 1, 2016, as Iowa voters prepared for that evening’s caucuses, Bandy Lee sat by the bedside of her mother, who was terminally ill with cancer. Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |