Bandy X. Lee is a professor of psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine. She is also the president of the World Mental Health Coalition. If you’ve heard of her, it’s possibly because of a book she edited called “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.” She has been warning about the state of President Trump’s health since the 2016 campaign. Now she is taking things a step further and suggesting that Nancy Pelosi has the right and the duty to essentially have Trump forcibly evaluated and possibly committed.
“As a coworker, she has the right to have him submit to an involuntary evaluation, but she has not,” Lee told Salon. “Anyone can call 911 to report someone who seems dangerous, and family members are the most typical ones to do so. But so can coworkers, and even passersby on the street. The law dictates who can determine right to treatment, or civil commitment, and in all 50 U.S. states this includes a psychiatrist.
“The advantage of a coworker starting this process is that a court can mandate a mental capacity evaluation before the dangerous person returns to work,” Lee continued. “The committing physician is preferably the patient’s treater, but does not have to be.”
Personally, I think this is gibberish. Nancy Pelosi simply does not have this power and it’s stupid and discrediting of everything else Professor Lee has to say to suggest that she does. But there’s something else Lee says in this interview with Salon that is worth considering because it has independent merit.
SALON: You mention “shared psychosis” while “translating” the portion of Trump’s letter about law professor Jonathan Turley, who argued against impeachment. Are you implying that he suffers from shared psychosis? And can you elaborate on your “shared psychosis” description in general?
LEE: “Shared psychosis” is a phenomenon which happens in households or in nations when a sick person goes untreated and healthy members are in close contact. Rather than the sick person getting better, the otherwise healthy people take on symptoms of the sick person, as if they had the sickness themselves. It is a very dramatic phenomenon that equally dramatically disappears when you remove the sick person from contact or media exposure.
Anyone who has lived with a family member or loved one who suffers from addiction will be familiar with this phenomenon. What’s important here is that it is often quite true that people will get very sick when forced to live in close contact with someone who is sick. And it’s also true that they frequently will recover quickly if that person is removed from the scene, even for a brief period.
This can also work in the opposite direction. When exposed to an especially effective leader, people can perform at the very limits of their capabilities and achieve almost unimaginable things. Think of the best sports coaches, for example, people like Vince Lombardi or John Wooden. And if that leader is suddenly removed, the same people can revert to a normal level of competency or worse.
Leadership is under-appreciated in its influence on the character of the nation. There are certainly structural and societal changes that have driven the Republican Party to embrace white nationalism. Demographic changes coupled with rising regional inequality and hollowed out local economies have caused enormous anxiety in communities all over America. You will see people try to explain the rise of Trumpism almost exclusively in these deterministic terms. But the same people elected Barack Obama as elected Donald Trump. Some things come down to chance, like a butterfly ballot design in Palm Beach County, Florida, or the strange distortions introduced by the Electoral College. It’s hard to agree that anything made the election of our recent presidents in any way inevitable. What’s clearer is that George W. Bush exercised a dramatically different kind of leadership than Al Gore world have, and that the same is certainly true of Obama and John McCain and Trump and Hillary Clinton.
Trump’s form of leadership makes us sick. Removing him from office is likely to make us well. His influence will be semi-permanent in many ways, but we shouldn’t discount the possibility that we can make a quick recovery. Even the Republican Party should be expected to get healthier once he is no longer in a position of power.
It’s true that Trump is partially a symptom of larger forces in our society, but he’s also a unique force in his own right who is causing us all to perform at a very low level. We cannot be at our best when exposed to his sickness. If we remove him from office and limit our exposure to him, we will see dramatic improvements across the board as a nation.
An interesting post. My simplistic view is that Trump’s removal is the equivalent of vomiting. Vomiting is unpleasant. But its sometimes the best means of expelling a toxin and usually facilitates relief. However, the mess still requires cleanup afterwards. Trump’s removal either through an unlikely 2/3 thirds vote in the senate or at the polls in November, would be a national vomiting. It has to be done. Its also not a cure all. The underlying socio-economic catalysts of the Trump toxin must also be addressed.
Useful analogy. Would not be surprised if the mess requires – metaphorically speaking – replacing the carpet and some furnishings, given the severity of the vomiting required. And yes, unless something is done about that underlying toxin, we’ll be vomiting practically every other election cycle.
Don Durito new carpeting and furniture will definitely be required. Indeed, we’re going to need extensive fumigation!
Excellent column. The role of mass psychology as a driver of political events is something that is underappreciated, in part because we really don’t understand it. But the Trump phenomenon–and the broader trends of polarization in our society–have gotten me thinking about it more and more.
We are not really used to thinking of current events in terms of mass psychological forces, but if we look at the history of the 20th century, it is clear that it can gain control of the destiny of nations. In our country, there was the red scare of the 50s, which we perhaps discount because it was only a momentary hysteria. In Germany, of course, there was the mass psychosis of the nation under the Nazis. Those who were not enthralled by Hitler would say afterwards that it was like the whole country had gone crazy. Well, these days, it feels as if half the country has gone crazy. If there was ever an Emperor who had no clothes, it is Trump, and yet half the nation looks to him as a savior.
The analogy in the latter case is perhaps particularly apt. There were economic and cultural forces roiling postwar German society that made the rise of Nazis possible. But there was a lot of contingency in their rise to power–it could have happened another way. And the result of mass genocide was by no means inevitable in the absence of a particular interaction between a damaged nation and a charismatic but psychotic leader. I’m not claiming that Trump is leading us to fascism or genocide in exactly the same way, but there is certainly a similar witches brew at play here.
I see this as wishful thinking. Removing Trump is necessary to becoming healthier but in no way sufficient, the Republican Party that created him must also be removed from power. Removing Trump without removing Mitch McConnell simply takes us back in time ten years, and nobody but Joe Biden thinks that was a good time.
Excellent point.
Meanwhile at Huff Post:
The nation became dangerously sick in the first decade of the 21st Century, and as the second decade dawned, Gravedigger of Democracy McConnell and the “conservative” movement worked ceaselessly to destroy the fabric of the nation and embitter the populace. The ensuing paralysis under a Repub Congress worked to further undermine the idea that government could do any good, and paved the way for the angry rightwing populism of National Trumpalism. Thus I would say that the nation was quite sick before Trump, but has gotten significantly sicker under his “leadership”.
The more controversial element of your claim is that we will “get well” if Trump is removed from office, based on the ideas of psychology. It is true that his removal would greatly reduce the danger of having an unqualified, mentally unbalanced sadist as prez, with all the attendant risks this brings, both to the world and to various populations at home. It would also improve the despairing mental health of many (largely anti-Trump) people, while causing mass rage, hysteria and “acting out” (mass shootings, etc) in the remaining 40-46%–i.e. the Trump cultists. I guess the idea is that Trump’s removal would quickly positively affect them as well? This seems a hard sell, ha-ha.
The Nazi experience is instructive–the dictator only began to lose his cult of omniscience and infallibility when his colossal errors in (military) judgment came home to roost, with both the Russians and the Allies advancing everywhere against the Reich. This resulted in the high point of Regime opposition, when the cabal of Prussian aristocratic general staff officers planted the bomb in Hitler’s conference room in July 1944— an explosion that unfortunately failed to assassinate him. That failure resulted in a general purge of the Army and domestic resistance movements, and there were no further social forces that could do anything against the dictator until the Russian tanks entered Berlin and the Allies met at the Elbe in May 1945, a national Gotterdammerung effectively destroying a united Germany for almost 50 years.
Unlike Hitler, Der Trumper never had any perceived period of “omniscience and infallibility”, being an ignorant dunce and manifest incompetent from day one. But once authoritarian, anti-democratic elements have poisoned a critical mass of the body politic and taken control of national institutions like the executive branch and judicial system, “removal” and “wellness” become very problematic. But the Gravedigger of Democracy (who may be the real villain of the piece) was perfectly willing to go there in order to impose the perverse image of “conservatism” onto the nation, and the path to regaining wellness will be very difficult, just as Nazi Germany found.
I actually do think that Trump’s cult will vanish very quickly once he is no longer in a position of power. And a lot of people who were seemingly healthy before he arrived will revert to health once he is gone. This includes many of his supporters.
They might disappear temporarily, but their forces will likely be summoned again as something akin to the Tea Party for opposition purposes. At the end of Bush’s two terms it seemed like they were down to thirty something, but how quickly did that number creep up? We thought Obama was some kind of awakening for this country, or at least a rebuke, but all they did was regroup, obstruct, and deny Merritt Garland a vote. Not only were they not punished, but they were rewarded with Trump and a host of judges.
I have a long standing history with anxiety. I have had my anxiety amps up to 11 since Trump announced his candidacy. I have interacted as I have accordingly. I drink much more than I used to. Almost like I was an undergrad again, except without the fun. I use sedatives to an extent that is unhealthy. The sooner he goes, the better off I am. Simple as that. I can handle predictable stupidity. I cannot handle so easily chaos as it turns out – especially when it triggers experiences w/neo-Nazism.
My ex used to work at a children’s residential psychiatric hospital. She always said that the kids were crazy because their parents were crazy. Once the kids were removed from their environment most of them were fine.
I’ve had a theory for decades that the reason the culture of the early 1980s is so strange — the infantilism; the nostalgia; the bizarre new-wave music; Spielberg’s ET; Michael Jackson; Falcon Crest on television — is that Reagan is President, and that this basic fact is so bizarre and incorrect that everyone has to develop serious psychological protective layers of escapism and absurdism to get through it.
The Trump years are probably going to look the same in retrospect. Stuff that appears sane now — Marvel movies; Kanye records; Jimmy Fallon — will, decades later, make us go, “Oh my God, yeah…remember the Trump age? How the hell did we get through it? No wonder we were bingeing ‘Stranger Things’ episodes!”