Full Speeches of Our Eminent Conference Panelists, Part 2

Mental Health Panel, First Two Speakers: Robert Jay Lifton and Judith Herman

The National Press Club Conference was historically significant, not just for the theme but the gathering of the greatest minds of psychiatry.  It is no exaggeration to say that they are “living legends” of our time.  Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen called them, “the greatest living American thinkers in the field of mental health.” The original group that had assembled for my Yale School of Medicine conference, which started our speaking about the dangers of Donald Trump almost eight years ago and produced our bestselling book—had come together again, in full circle.

I am privileged to have encountered them while we were all in Cambridge.  I had just finished my fellowship in social medicine under Arthur Kleinman and Leon Eisenberg when I started attending Robert Jay Lifton’s “Mass Violence” meetings, which included Nobel laureates, anti-nuclear activists, anti-Bush wars activists, and, of course, Judith Herman—author of the celebrated classic, Trauma and Recovery—and James Gilligan, author of the influential Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic and my mentor since residency training.  We each since left Harvard, except Herman: Lifton joined Columbia, Gilligan New York University, and I Yale, where I would reassemble the group fifteen years later to try to meet a national emergency.  Now, it is twenty-three years later.

Such a group of extraordinary minds, who not only contributed knowledge and innovated but acted and served as a moral compass for the world, may be difficult to find for a while.  Even Lifton, whom the New York Times had regularly featured, was absent from its pages in the Trump era.  Instead, it favored the likes of Jeffrey Lieberman, who tortured subordinates with his racism and sexism for seventeen years before he was finally fired for a racist “tweet”.  We may be seeing in the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA’s) myopic approach, “the closing of the psychiatric mind.”  For self-preservation and profit, the establishment compromised in ways that I felt the need to resign from the APA in 2007, only to witness it corrupt even further under Donald Trump.  Just as the field has proven useless if not harmful when the public needed it most, it is increasingly found useless if not harmful in individual treatment (mostly because of pharmaceutical industry conflicts).

Hence, I hope you will take the time to hear the perspectives of these great contributors to the field, to science and philosophy more broadly, and to our current civilization as a whole, for they were all at the National Press Club Conference.  We start with Robert Jay Lifton and Judith Herman:

Their writing is the first to be featured in our new book, released with the Conference, where you will discover that everything they predicted came true.

Announcement:

Dr. Bandy X. Lee will hold a live session on:

“Containing Trump Contagion –
Healing Our Collective Mental Health”

Tomorrow, October 11, 2024, at 12 noon EDT/9 a.m. PDT on Zoom.  A paid subscription is required to receive a link the morning before.  Thank you!

Dr. Lee is a forensic and social psychiatrist and an expert on violence who became known to the public with her 2017 book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.  She recently organized a major National Press Club Conference on the theme of, “The Much More Dangerous Case of Donald Trump”—of which the summary video is here—we have much material to work from.  We have also successfully published our new book, The More Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 40 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Warn Anew. This was all made possible because of your generosity—and we now ask for your help once more to reach millions with our vital message from the Conference, for we may not survive another dangerously unfit presidency in this very dangerous world!