Full Speeches of Our Eminent Mental Health Panelists, on Speaking Up

Stephen Soldz and Henry Friedman Discuss Their Ethical Roles as Professionals

Esquire printed: “Finally, the New York Times is Getting Real about Trump’s Mental … Status: The damn truth has been lying there … and far too few people picked it up.”  Yet, even this article has not picked up on consulting mental health experts.

No one has.  The Washington Post Editorial Board recounted the increasingly extreme remarks by Donald Trump, such as the one in Wisconsin: “They will walk into your kitchen [and] cut your throat,” speaking of undocumented immigrants.  Later, he called them “animals”.

In Pennsylvania, he dubbed Kamala Harris born “mentally impaired.”  In Michigan, he said of immigrants: “We allowed them to come in and raid and rape our country.”  In a podcast, he called them murderers, because “it’s in their genes….  We got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”  He said there was little federal help after two major hurricanes, because: “Kamala spent all her FEMA money, billions of dollars, on housing for illegal migrants.”

The Conference compared Donald Trump to the worst mass murderers of history, and Dr. Henry Friedman would come to warn against a “Trump Holocaust.”

The Associated Press published an article with the title: “Sanewashing?  The Banality of Crazy?  A Decade into the Trump Era, Media Hasn’t Figured Him Out.”  How can one, when truly clinically serious questions must be addressed without experts?  It would be the equivalent of plunging into the Covid-19 pandemic and having to figure out how to survive, through trial and error, without access to scientific knowledge or expertise.

This indeed happened halfway with the viral pandemic under Donald Trump because of his spread of disinformation and his need to seize the spotlight, but it happened all the way with the mental health pandemic because of the American Psychiatric Association’s silencing of experts.

We warned at the time that what it did—that is, change its ethics policy to pander to the Trump administration—would be worse than what the American Psychological Association did—that is, change its ethics policy to participate in the George W. Bush administration’s torture program—which Dr. Stephen Soldz bravely helped expose.

Soldz is a professor at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis.  He spearheaded the American Psychological Association’s change of policies, so as no longer to authorize torture.

Friedman is an associate professor at both Tufts and Harvard Medical Schools.  In 2017, he contributed to the chapter, “On Seeing What You See and Saying What You Know,” in protest of the American Psychiatric Association’s absurd claim that it was ethical to pretend we did not see what we saw and above all to say nothing.

Here are the full talks of Soldz and Friedman:

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!