A Dangerous Mind
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. 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. What shocked her was the way Trump interacted with the crowd. “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.”
His belligerent behavior meant more to Lee than it might to a casual viewer. As part of her clinical work in prison settings, she had evaluated and treated hundreds of violent offenders, including leaders of prison gangs. As a native New Yorker, she had assumed that Trump “was just a shady businessman,” she told me, but “I suddenly realized that he had a lot in common” with those patients. “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. 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.”
Fast forward to November 9, 2016, the day after the election. Lee’s friends and colleagues were bombarding her with calls and emails. Would Trump’s victory herald an increase in hate crimes? “You are a violence expert,” one implored. “Can you do something?”
She decided to jump into the fray, organizing an academic conference that took place in New Haven the following April. Titled “Does Professional Responsibility Include a Duty to Warn?” the meeting featured a handful of prominent psychiatrists, including Robert Jay Lifton, author of (1986), who addressed Trump’s mental state and the risks they believed it posed to the health and safety of Americans. 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.”
