Full Speeches of Our Eminent Mental Health Panelists, on Mass Violence

James Gilligan and James Merikangas Speak as Forensic Psychiatrists and Violence Scholars

This year, the Nobel Peace Prize has gone to Nihon Hidankyo, a Japanese organization of Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombing survivors, for their work toward international nuclear disarmament.  They struggled almost eighty years amid a great deal of silencing and shunning, as reminders of the human capacity to engineer apocalyptic horror.  The Norwegian committee sometimes confers the award as a statement on humanity’s current needs, which was confirmed when the committee chair himself stated: “The taboo against the use of nuclear weapons is under pressure.”

That this attenuation of “taboo” would indeed have formidable pressure—which would cause a proliferation of nuclear weapons and an acceleration of a nuclear arms race in unprecedented ways—is one of Donald Trump’s psychological effects that mental health experts have been trying to warn against.  There have been other periods when we have gone backward in this respect—for example, during the war-mongering of the George W. Bush administration—but never before have we had pathological bellicosity emanating from the presidency in a way that would lay down the psychological foundation for nuclear self-annihilation.  Many do not grasp this, which is why I wrote a book to explain, The Psychology of Trump Contagion: An Existential Danger to American Democracy and All Humankind.

The opening video for the Conference featured Dr. James Gilligan in a 2018 interview stating that, with Donald Trump, we may see: “a level of violent destructiveness on this earth that we have never seen before.”

Gilligan, my mentor, has been a leader in a public health approach to violence prevention, by demonstrating how we can research, predict, and prevent violence.  He helped to organize “the Boston Miracle” in his role as director of the Harvard Institute of Law and Psychiatry.   He was chair of President Bill Clinton’s National Campaign Against Youth Violence and served in a similar capacity for Tony Blair, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the World Court, and the World Economic Forum.

Dr. James Merikangas has a similarly illustrious background working with the most violent individuals our society produces.  He is renowned for his detailed neuropsychiatric evaluations of inmates on death row and was, like Gilligan, among the first to recognize the magnitude of danger Donald Trump posed.  His participation in the Conference allowed for the reunion of the recent panel putting together our pre-sentencing report of Trump’s dangerousness risk assessment for the Manhattan District Criminal Court, when his sentencing was scheduled for July 2024.  The report should frighten us all—and can be found in our new publication, The More Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 40 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Warn Anew.

Here are the full speeches of Gilligan and Merikangas:

The videos of full speeches from the Conference are here. The Conference summary video is here.  The book that was released with the Conference is here.  The Conference website will have regular updates.  Please continue to support our getting out our critical message from the Conference, for, as our gathering revealed, we may not survive another dangerously unfit presidency in this very dangerous world!