Darkness Visible

The Violence the U.S. President Responds to is Actually the Violence in His Mind

The nation is now watching it unfold.

We mental health experts have long warned that internal states determine external manifestations, and that the dangerousness evident to us in Donald Trump would result in dire consequences if we did not intervene. His deployment of the National Guard in Washington, DC, and seizing control of its police force is just the kind of manifestation we warned against.

His claim that the nation’s capital is “lawless” and is “one of the most dangerous cities anywhere in the world” of course has no validity in reality. Many had hoped that reality would curb him, be it the Covid-19 pandemic or the January 6 insurrection—but when an overwhelming internal reality blinds one to external reality, he will not see what the rest of us see.

It does not matter that violent crime in DC is at a 30-year low, just as there has been no rhyme or reason to his sending out more than 4000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines to Southern California to quell imaginary “lawlessness” in June.

Here is the real reason: he said Los Angeles would be “the first, perhaps, of many,” as immigration raids erupt all over the country under his authorization. “You know, we didn’t attack this one very strongly. You’ll have them all over the country.” Now, he is fulfilling his promise, and it will only grow worse over time.

Indeed, his psychopathology almost guarantees that violence will be unleashed, primarily against those who represent what he never had—which is why caregiver-child bonds were among the first he targeted at the U.S.-Mexico border. Now, his targets are successful students and academics on green cards or visas; upright, hard-working people simply trying to make a living; and hundreds of other innocent persons the Trump administration mislabels as “criminal gangs.” This will be so, even as he has customarily pardoned, emboldened, and bolstered truly violent criminals at all levels, from drug-kingpins to war criminals.

This is not an accident, which is why there needs to be recognition that dangerousness and mental unfitness matter.

In the popular mind, mental health professionals merely sit in their offices diagnosing private patients. What does this have to contribute to societal affairs? one might ask. What is largely unknown is that mental health experts have other functions as well. Whereas law enforcement generally intervenes after dangerous acts erupt—if it does at all, since it will not happen where “lunatics” are in charge of the asylum—mental health experts intervene before the dangers unfold.

This is because we perform tasks such as assess dangerousness—which we do for every patient or even persons we encounter in the street—assist with sentencing in courts, and evaluate mental fitness for duty for jobs that deal with life-or-death situations. The former (diagnosing) is by contract with a patient, and something we choose. The latter (assessing danger) is a societal duty, and something we cannot back away from.

Imagine where we would be, if the public had been educated correctly about mental health issues: that we deal with them intelligently and thoughtfully, using the mental health knowledge we have? We would be in a very different place. Even today, had every politician, policymaker, journalist, and activist in the country consulted with mental health experts, our responses would be far more enlightened. Instead, the most relevant experts are sidelined and frustrated—if not tormented—by watching needless suffering and chaos, while the rest of the world seems only to sink further into a quicksand, with each step it takes to try to escape.

This is why I have called, from the very beginning, the American Psychiatric Association’s shortsighted decision to black out mental health experts from the media, “the greatest abdication of medical duty in U.S. history.” Certainly, conflating diagnosing (a private affair) with assessing danger (a societal duty), when it should have known better, is disingenuous and has come at great cost—the cost of a nation.

It is the difference between applying modern medicine and reliving the Plague (which we now may, also).

Since when do we say, “We know he is sick,” and then never call the doctor? The self-sabotage inherent in this approach needs no further explanation. Yet the bigger, the deadlier, and the more catastrophic the problem becomes, those who might know best what to do are not called upon, and even less thought about.

One of the most profound concepts the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, illumined is that a person’s underlying mental health—or the quality of internal dynamics—critically shapes the capacity for healthy, adaptive, and constructive behavior. What is swept under the rug, therefore, does not go away. On the other hand, if one has mental health, almost any choice one makes will be positive and productive.

This is why I have stated from the very beginning that our warnings have nothing to do with political affiliation. If Donald Trump were a Democrat—which he was at one time—he would be just as destructive, using liberal ideologies (consider Josef Stalin, for example).

By excluding mental health experts from public discourse, we have made the most tragic decision possible in the midst of a mental health pandemic. Then, not knowing who is the true authority anymore, the media only reach out to loud imposters (I will not mention whom, with the initials J.G.—and I apologize to those who have become attached to him, but I cannot endorse a false prophet who rose to where he is parasitically, while sabotaging our movement in the early stages). He is a far cry from where he was when I told a New York Times reporter, who interviewed me for a front-page article, that I would refuse the interview if he were interviewed, too—and he said: “I would never interview him; he’s the worst!” Yet, he is now all society has, just as Donald Trump is all our nation has—for they have each pushed out all the others. For malignant narcissists, it is important that they be up front, not the issue, which is why nothing truly gets solved.

All this is to point to what Freud’s colleague and counterpart, Carl Jung, called, “the shadow.” The unconscious part of ourselves that holds repressed traits, impulses, and emotions we do not wish to acknowledge does not go away when we avoid it. We must acknowledge its existence, bring it to light and deal with it for it to lose its power. As Jung summarized:

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.

Announcement:

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Dr. Lee is a forensic and social psychiatrist who became known to the public through her 2017 Yale conference and book that emphasized the importance of fit leadership. In 2019, she organized a major National Press Club Conference on the theme of, “The Dangerous State of the World and the Need for Fit Leadership.” In 2024, she followed up with another major Conference, “The More Dangerous State of the World and the Need for Fit Leadership.” She published another book on fit leadership that has been recently expanded, in addition to a volume on how unfitness in a leader spreads and two critical statements on fit leadership. Dr. Lee warned that journalists and intellectuals are the first to be suppressed in times of unfit leadership, and it is happening here; she continues, however, to be interviewed or covered abroad, such as in France, Germany, Norway, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Italy, Poland, Russia, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Mexico, and Canada (with notable articles in Estonian, Lithuanian, Slovakian, Ukrainian, Turkish, Persian, and Korean). She authored the internationally-acclaimed textbook, Violence; over 100 peer-reviewed articles and chapters; and 17 scholarly books and journal special issues, in addition to over 300 opinion editorials. Dr. Lee is also a master of divinity, currently developing a new curriculum for public education on “One World or None.”