Bandy X. Lee has been ringing the alarm bell for three years. Now she’s wheeling out the gong.
The Yale University forensic psychiatrist published a book in 2017 called “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” in which she and more than two-dozen other mental-health experts warned -- despite the “Goldwater rule,” which prohibits psychiatrists from diagnosing someone they have not personally examined -- that the new president’s mental capacity was in doubt.
Lee and her colleagues have now pored over former special counsel Robert Mueller’s 448-page report into Russia’s election interference and President Trump’s “obstructive behavior,” and used it to put together a new mental-health analysis of the president. The information in the Mueller Report, they concluded, is even better than a personal clinical examination of the president.
In their analysis, Lee told Raw Story this week, “we highlighted the greater importance of collateral information in a functional, not diagnostic, exam -- in other words, reports on [Trump’s] capacity to fulfill the duties of his office by co-workers and close associates are more valuable than a personal interview, which can distort the actual situation by presenting a desired scenario of events rather than reality.”
The upshot?
“In sum,” the mental-health experts wrote in their Mueller Report analysis, “[Trump] failed every criterion of sound mental capacity to make rational, reality-based decisions, which are critical to functioning in the role of President.”
Below you can watch a short video of Lee discussing their analysis:
Lee says Congress and the American people need to act soon to prevent catastrophe.
“There is very little time now,” she says. “Things will likely escalate from here ... This is how the chaos, violence and fear so apparent in Donald Trump’s psychology translates into chaos, violence and fear in the White House, the nation and the world at large.”
Lee and four of her colleagues will summarize their analysis of the Mueller Report -- and answer questions -- during an “online town hall” on July 16. Mueller is scheduled to testify before Congress the next day, but reports Friday indicate the former special counsel’s testimony might be postponed by a week.
Still haven’t read the Mueller Report? “Black Hawk Down” author Mark Bowden has summarized it, complete with comic-book-style illustrations, so that it “reads in parts like a thriller, like a comedy, like a tragedy.”
-- Douglas Perry
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