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Renowned psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton on the Goldwater Rule: We have a duty to warn if someone may be dangerous to others.
By Bill Moyers | September 14, 2017
There will not be a book published this fall more urgent, important, or controversial than The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, the work of 27 psychiatrists, psychologists and mental health experts to assess President Trumps mental health. They had come together last March at a conference at Yale University to wrestle with two questions. One was on countless minds across the country: Whats wrong with him? The second was directed to their own code of ethics: Does Professional Responsibility Include a Duty to Warn if they conclude the president to be dangerously unfit?
As mental health professionals, these men and women respect the long-standing Goldwater rule which inhibits them from diagnosing public figures whom they have not personally examined. At the same time, as explained by Dr. Bandy X Lee, who teaches law and psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine, the rule does not have a countervailing rule that directs what to do when the risk of harm from remaining silent outweighs the damage that could result from speaking about a public figure which in this case, could even be the greatest possible harm. It is an old and difficult moral issue that requires a great exertion of conscience. Their decision: We respect the rule, we deem it subordinate to the single most important principle that guides our professional conduct: that we hold our responsibility to human life and well-being as paramount. Hence, this profound, illuminating and discomforting book undertaken as a duty to warn.
The foreword is by one of Americas leading psychohistorians, Robert Jay Lifton. He is renowned for his studies of people under stress for books such as Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (1967), Home from the War: Vietnam Veterans Neither Victims nor Executioners (1973), and The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (1986). The Nazi Doctors was the first in-depth study of how medical professionals rationalized their participation in the Holocaust, from the early stages of the Hitlers euthanasia project to extermination camps.
The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump will be published Oct. 3 by St. Martins Press.
Here is my interview with Robert Jay Lifton Bill Moyers
http://billmoyers.com/story/dangerous-case-donald-trump-robert-jay-lifton-bill-moyers-duty-warn/
FiveGoodMen
(20,018 posts)I'm beating this horse to death, but we don't just have a demented POS in the White House, we have 100 million of them all around us.
Initech
(100,033 posts)Unfortunately it may be too little too late before President Man Baby gets us all killed.