The vindication of Bandy Lee. She warned us that Donald Trump would unleash violence.

[elleng]

4. I HOPE she has actually been vindicated by the 'professional' group she's joined.

*Shortly after the book came out, leaders of the American Psychiatric Association began publicly attacking Lee, arguing she was acting irresponsibly. Her alleged offense was violating the 1973 Goldwater Rule, an APA guideline stating that “it is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion” of anyone without conducting a personal examination and getting proper approval.

The rule was the APA’s response to a 1966 lawsuit by Barry Goldwater, the late Arizona senator and presidential candidate. Goldwater had successfully sued Goldwater Fact magazine, which, shortly before the 1964 general election, ran a piece in which dozens of leading psychiatrists offered crude armchair assessments of the state of Goldwater’s psyche. “His impulsive, impetuous behavior…reflects an emotionally immature, unstable personality,” wrote one doctor, who went on to cite Goldwater’s “inability to dissociate himself from vituperative, sick extremists.” (While the archconservative’s fiery campaign speeches were startling to many Americans at the time, they now seem relatively tame compared with Trump’s.) . . .

“Anything a psychiatrist says without examining a patient is likely to be inaccurate, so it can harm the public figure,” says Paul Appelbaum, a Columbia University professor who has served as the APA’s president. Appelbaum is also concerned that diagnosing people from a distance casts the profession in a negative light: “These seemingly cavalier and politically motivated public statements can prevent people from getting the psychiatric care that they need.” . .

None of the arguments in support of Lee’s rationale carried much weight with John Krystal, Yale’s chair of psychiatry, who in May 2020 abruptly fired her from the teaching position she had held for 17 years. Krystal previously had tolerated her public pronouncements, so long as she made it clear she was speaking for herself and not the medical school.

What pushed him over the edge, apparently, was a January 2020 Twitter dustup between Lee and retired law professor and Trump confidant Alan Dershowitz. Lee asserted that Dershowitz had taken on “Trump’s symptoms by contagion,” whereupon he accused her of publicly diagnosing him, and then complained about Lee in an email to Yale administrators. Lee should be disciplined, he wrote, due to “a serious violation” of the APA’s ethics rules. He also asked Yale to keep him posted on its plan of action. Krystal referenced the tweets in Lee’s dismissal letter, which cites her “repeated violations” of the Goldwater Rule and an “inappropriate transfer of the duty to warn from the treatment setting to national politics.”

Lee insists she was addressing patterns of behavior, not offering any formal diagnosis, and she sued Yale six months later for allegedly violating her academic freedom. (The case is pending.) She wants her job back but insists her legal action is about something bigger. “When academics are pressured to give in to power, we have to stand up. We need to make sure that intellectual knowledge and facts are valued,” she says.

Lee’s dismissal, meanwhile, elicited outrage from prominent academics who complain that university administrators have gotten increasingly sensitive to controversies that might rub donors the wrong way. “There is now a lot less tolerance in academia for scholars like Lee who speak the truth bluntly,” says NYU historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of 2020’s Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, which chronicles the turn of numerous countries—including the United States—toward authoritarianism.

While Lee remains persona non grata in medical school psychiatry departments, she has not abandoned her lifelong academic pursuits. She also earned a master’s degree from the Yale Divinity School during her first few years in New Haven and was recently made a visiting professor at Union Theological Seminary, where she will work with Gilligan and sociologist Jim Vrettos to establish a violence prevention institute. She continues to consult on prison reform for state governments and social service agencies.

In June, as Lee watched the first round of public hearings of the January 6 committee—which have exposed Trump as “a clear and present danger to democracy,” to quote testimony by the retired federal judge and Republican icon J. Michael Luttig—she was comforted by a slew of emails thanking her for her lonely crusade to warn the nation about Trump. “I’ve alerted my congressman to read your work,” noted one writer.'>>>

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/08/donald-trump-violence-mental-health-dangerous-jan-6-fbi-mar-a-lago-civil-war-bandy-lee-psychiatry-goldwater-rule/

This HAS been, and continues to be serious, and Dr. Bandy Lee appears to continue to 'suffer' under 'professional' b.s. I hope I am wrong, and that she has in fact been vindicated.