Should Brandy X,. Lee Lose Her License To Practice?

Plan released to have Trump declared mentally unfit, removed from office

January 7, 2018

Evan El-Amin / Shutterstock.com

It seems the Democrats and their hand-picked minions will never stop working to remove President Donald Trump from office by any means necessary. Now, what they’re trying to produce seems nothing short of a coup d’état.

To that end, Democrat members of Congress called on Yale University psychiatry professor Dr. Bandy X. Lee to “diagnose” the president’s mental health with the help of members of Congress on Capitol Hill. This is undoubtedly part of a long-running scheme to have President Trump forcefully removed from office.

There is just one issue: Dr. Lee has never met the president, let alone examined him. Nevertheless, she told members of Congress that they have to act to remove him from office — now.

“Urgent Steps”

“We write as mental health professionals who have been deeply concerned about Donald Trump’s psychological aberrations,” Lee said in a statement issued on Wednesday and co-authored by two other mental health professionals.

She continued:

We believe that he is now further unraveling in ways that contribute to his belligerent nuclear threats. We urge that those around him, and our elected representatives in general, take urgent steps to restrain his behavior and head off the potential nuclear catastrophe that endangers not only Korea and the United States but all of humankind.

The statement was signed by more than 100 other mental health professionals calling themselves the National Coalition of Concerned Mental Health Experts.

The Goldwater Rule

Not only are these mental health professionals violating basic ethics by publicly discussing an analysis they made about a man they never met — they are violating an old, established rule.

The Goldwater Rule, according to the American Psychiatric Association (APA), “prohibits psychiatrists from offering opinions on someone they have not personally evaluated.”

The APA continued:

The rule is so named because of its association with an incident that took place during the 1964 presidential election.

During that election, Fact magazine published a survey in which they queried some 12,356 psychiatrists on whether candidate Sen. Barry Goldwater, the GOP nominee, was psychologically fit to be president. A total of 2,417 of those queried responded, with 1,189 saying that Goldwater was unfit to assume the presidency.

Despite denouncement of the practice of violating this rule from the APA and numerous books on the subject, however, Lee and her colleagues maintain that Trump is unfit for office.

“From a medical perspective, when we see someone unraveling like this, it’s an emergency,” Lee said. “We’ve never come so close in my career to this level of catastrophic violence that could be the end of humankind.”

“Malicious Gossip Queen”

Pundits and psychiatrists alike see Lee and her colleagues as doing a disservice to many in her profession by failing to adhere to the so-called Goldwater Rule.

Washington Examiner, Becket Adams, explained:

[The Goldwater Rule] is a good rule. First, it is impossible to measure a person’s mental wellbeing accurately from news clippings and soundbites alone. You can speculate and wonder, sure. But standing atop one’s medical credentials, and dispensing rulings when one hasn’t even spoken with the subject, is dangerous and sloppy. One must at least meet with the subject to get an unfiltered look at the state of their thinking. A first-hand assessment versus a conclusion derived from secondhand information is the difference between a trained mental health professional and a malicious gossip queen.

Second, armchair analyses are dangerous because they further stigmatize mental health issues. It is difficult enough for those who struggle to seek help. They don’t need self-declared professions marching on to television to declare someone who talks funny and behaves peculiarly a nut job. That sort of untrained, gut “analysis” will only drive the afflicted further underground.

Adams concludes, “Lee doesn’t seem to care about the damage her ‘analysis’ does to the years others have spent de-stigmatizing the issue. She believes Trump is an exception to the Goldwater Rule.”

Additionally, Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman, former APA president, castigated the letter and its signatories. The Los Angeles Times reports:

In a letter to the editors of the New England Journal of Medicine, Lieberman says he believes Lee, Pouncey and the rest are “acting in good faith and are convinced they are fulfilling a moral obligation.” But the history of psychiatry is littered with examples of mental health professionals being “exploited” for political purposes, he wrote, citing doctors who gave cover to Nazi eugenics policies and those who helped confine dissidents to mental hospitals in the People’s Republic of China.

“Although moral and civic imperatives justify citizens’ speaking out against injustices of government and its leaders, that does not mean that psychiatrists can use their medical credentials to brand elected officials with neuropsychiatric diagnoses without sufficient evidence and appropriate circumstances,” Lieberman wrote. “To do so undermines the profession’s integrity and credibility.”

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“Huge Ethical Lapse”

It isn’t just conservatives who suffer from this psychiatric malpractice, however. A 2016 Media Matters article argued that medical professionals attempting to diagnose Hillary Clinton were essentially committing malpractice:

Medical experts, some who represent hundreds of medical professionals, are warning that trying to diagnose Clinton without having examined her or researched her entire medical history is simply wrong.

“Diagnosing a person who is not your patient without ever examining that person or reviewing his or her entire medical record signifies a huge ethical lapse on the part of a physician,” Len Bruzzese, executive director of the Associate of Health Care Journalists, told Media Matters at the 

Lee and her colleagues should take this advice to heart.

Judging a high-profile individual based on little evidence and no first-hand knowledge can only cause problems for everyone involved.