Below is the recording of the first session, on July 5, 2024, of the topic:
“How do We Recover Our Democracy?
Democracy as a Sign of Collective Mental Health”
Please note: This is a private video, intended only for subscribers and their private shares. Thank you for your understanding.
Dr. Lee is a forensic psychiatrist, social psychiatrist, and expert on violence who came into prominence in 2017 with her book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. Since then, she has endeavored to warn the American public of the societal dangers that would result from someone so mentally-impaired as Donald Trump being given the powers of the U.S. presidency. Dr. Lee will explain how what we are seeing today is a product of Trump Contagion, collective psychosis, and collective criminality. Her new book, The Psychology of Trump Contagion: An Existential Threat to American Democracy and All Humankind, is available through paid subscription or by ebook.
Thank you so much, Dr. Lee, for hosting this session and posting it. This work is vital for helping us put everything that is happening with Trump and his contagion into perspective, for inoculating us against it, and for providing us with the strength and courage to keep going in the face of it. We need to be able to see it in order to stand strong against it. I also have difficulty sleeping from the effects of what must be collective PTSD from Trump contagion and abuse.
I do have a thought: I wonder if in some way things had to get to this point for people to see what is happening. In 1991 when Bush Sr got us into the War in Iraq under false pretenses, in 2005 when Bush Jr. lied us into the Iraq War again, when the US got into and stayed in Afghanistan, and the fighting in Syria, the disaster in Libya, etc., all while CEOs and corporations got tax break after tax break and the 1% got everything while the rest of us still can't get the healthcare we need without going into debt -- in other words lie after lie after lie. And no one held accountable for anything. I started to see it in 2005, but didn't understand it enough to be able to say what was happening. So I wonder if it all had to get so big and so bad that we couldn't help but see that something is wrong and, as you were briefly talking about toward the end here, that many laws and other things have to change for the good of all of us. In some ways it feels like it was always going to get to this point because so much was being done to Americans and others around the world right under our noses without anyone saying a peep about it while those in power laughed all the way to the bank. Now that our health and well-being are threatened, maybe enough people will see that things have to change. There needs to be a commission of some sort, along the lines of the Heritage Foundation, but for the common good of the actual people of the US. to write laws that support life, health and well-being, the environment, and certainly democracy. I have so many thoughts about what laws should be written, beginning with a new Declaration, this time a Declaration of Life or something like that, based possibly on FDR's new bill of rights. For starters. Such a commission should include you and Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Richard Wolff, Naomi Klein, and some student voices for starters.
Meanwhile, thank you again for sounding the alarm about all of this.
I couldn’t make the live session and appreciated catching up - thank you. My question to you is, why can so many people in the media and Congress question Biden’s mental fitness but not Trump’s? The real threat to our democracy is Trump, not Biden.