My Yale Lawsuit: About the APA and Lieberman

What do Yale, the American Psychiatric Association, and Jeffrey Lieberman Have in Common?

“When in doubt about their actions, ‘follow the money,’” my mentor said with respect to the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA’s) bizarre reasoning, when it dug out the obscure “Goldwater rule” in its public campaign to silence all mental health experts in the media.  It did so flaunting its concerns over “stigma”, when the scientific literature unequivocally states that silence about mental health issues is the primary cause of stigma.

It also misinterpreted “the Goldwater rule”—“It is not a prohibition but an affirmative obligation!” one of the original signatories said, flabbergasted at its misuse in the Trump era.  Consider the actual “rule”, paraphrased for greater clarity:

A physician has a responsibility to society and is expected to take part in activities that improve the community and better public health.  In doing so, if asked about a public figure, the physician shall educate the public, but make sure not to diagnose.

Imagine taking the “make sure not to diagnose” clause out of context and amplifying it to negate the original purpose of the guideline.  This is what “gaslighters” (psychological manipulators) do: they take a kernel of “truth” to turn the larger truth on its head.

“The Goldwater rule,” as the name itself suggests, was a political compromise resulting from Senator Barry Goldwater’s landslide loss in a presidential bid.  Unlike all other ethical guidelines, its basis was not in science or clinical practice.  Politically-generated “ethics” was thus bound to be politically corrupted, and indeed it was.

The APA’s intentions are known from the way it turned a blind eye to scores of members resigning, including a high-ranking officer, and how, when its own Ethics Committee assumed it would have to reconvene because of an inundation of protest letters, the leadership prohibited it.  Not only that, the leadership astonishingly prohibited all further discussion within the APA, knowing this would produce a firestorm, since at another meeting (the American College of Psychiatrists) an overwhelming majority of attendees opposed “the Goldwater rule” (and the American Psychoanalytic Association clarified its non-adherence to the “rule”).

No doubt the APA reasoned that, having already abused its authority to spread misimpressions and misinformation, it needed only to bide its time.  Indeed—it received unprecedented windfalls of federal funding under the Trump administration that would dwarf any membership dues it lost through the exodus, and having moved from Virginia to a “swanky” new building in a trendy part of DC, it is now shoulder-to-shoulder with Washington lobbyists.  Who would not wish to join now?  Psychiatry may have rendered itself useless to society, just as it has rendered itself useless to patients when it sold out to the pharmaceutical industry, but financially the APA has “won”.

Disgraced past APA president Jeffrey Lieberman championed spreading disinformation about psychiatrists who would speak conscientiously, by likening us to “Nazi and Soviet psychiatrists”—when in truth he was someone who had actually performed Nazi doctor-like experiments, violating human rights to get to his station, and who actually helped to advance a dangerous government, just like the Nazi psychiatrists.  Blind from his ambitions, he never saw the irony in his criticizing, among us, none but the famed author of Nazi Doctors.

The APA never disciplined any of its members for breaking even its draconian, Trump-era version of “the Goldwater rule”—perhaps since it would be revealed that the APA itself broke it when it publicly denounced us.  Also, the only prominent psychiatrists who have broken the actual “Goldwater rule” (not its impression) are Lieberman himself and former APA task force chair, Allen Frances—and they did so in a way that protected Donald Trump over the public, which violates not only the APA’s code of ethics but all the core tenets of medical ethics, including the universal Declaration of Geneva.

Lieberman, like the APA, received unprecedented federal funding within a year of silencing us.  The APA was already boasting that its federal funding had gone up 155 million dollars from the previous year—to 2 billion.  The same year, New York State Psychiatric Institute, which Lieberman headed, received 64 million dollars (despite being fined 10 million dollars three years earlier for overcharging), and Columbia’s psychiatry department, which Lieberman also headed, another 17 million.

Lieberman was eventually removed in disgrace from his position as Columbia’s chair of psychiatry, but not before causing the nation arguably more damage than anyone—apart from Donald Trump—as he did to his own psychiatry department—considered the best in the country before him.  Of course, long before his removal, he was loathed within the department, which causes one to wonder how such odious characters come to be chosen to head departments.

If Yale is similar to Columbia, then we know cui bono.  But cuid bono?  What does Yale stand to gain by toeing the APA’s line, already discredited among ethicists?  What did it stand to gain when the APA, for all its public claims, had no authority to discipline, since no licensing board agrees with its “rule”?  What gain could possibly be worth subordinating itself to a guild, abandoning its principles, and stating publicly that it has no obligation to academic freedom?

And for the federal judges on my Yale case, cuid bono?  What do they have to gain from contorting technicality after technicality, in order to skirt the true issue of free speech in a time of growing tyranny—the very principle their benches were created to protect?

As the judiciary proves itself broken from top to bottom, and Yale is beset by scandal after scandal, the American Psychiatric Association laboring to undermine the health of America exemplifies how everything “works” together in a system where many have much to gain.  Thus is a formula where “nothing works,” where a given field’s most incompetent members lead the field, and where institutions are rewarded for doing the very opposite of what they were instituted to do.  By the time we had elected a most dangerously-impaired individual to head the U.S. government in 2016, perhaps the course was already nearly set, but we can slow the course by speaking the truth, to declare that not all up is down, not all black is white, and not all truth is a lie—for, eventually, reality will matter.