The Abyss Ahead, Part 2

We are Now Here ... Now What do We Do?

(Continued from “The Abyss Ahead.”)

I was delighted to hear that the White House Chief of Staff General John Kelly diligently made use of our book as an “owner’s manual” to help contain a dangerous president—as revealed in Peter Baker’s coauthored bestseller, The Divider: Trump in the White House 2017-2021.  Indeed, we even learned that he made use of the principles we outlined possibly to avert a nuclear war with North Korea!  These are moments that reveal how correct we were to be concerned about total calamity, as well as the loss that is obvious from the difference our knowledge might have made with wider distribution.

Yet, society censors itself at these moments of greatest need. Baker is one of the New York Times reporters who tried to quote me multiple times, only to find that the paper published his articles without my quotes in them—even when my words were the centerpiece of his articles.  The chief opinion editor, who published the sole anonymous Times op-ed, was confident that he could get one of my pieces printed, but eventually could not, no matter how hard he tried. He profusely apologized, but it was hardly an isolated incident.

Just recently, National Public Radio canceled a segment with me on “All Things Considered” and again on “Here and Now,” which was recorded but not aired.  Both were canceled abruptly at the very last minute without explanation. This is not an accident: if our voice is the most critical, then it will be the most threatening—for nothing is more threatening to authoritarianism than the truth.

In fact, when I was interviewing fifteen hours a day on the most prominent news programs, it impressed me that there seemed to be almost no barrier regarding mental health matters.  However, we are now in a place where mental health matters are even more “taboo” than when we began in 2017, before the American Psychiatric Association (APA), acting as an arm of the government, intervened to shut us all down.  Ironically, by campaigning against our efforts to meet our societal duty as our “stigmatizing” those with mental illness, the APA stigmatized psychiatry itself as a forbidden field!

Therefore, what we warned in 2019, at a major interdisciplinary conference at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, that unchecked psychological dangers in the presidency would spread into social, cultural, geopolitical, and civic dangers, came to pass.  At the time, thirteen top national experts from areas as diverse as history, law, political science, economics, journalism, philosophy, social psychology, nuclear science, and environmental science joined and supported us.

Among those who spoke at the conference to warn against the serious dangers of Donald Trump was the late Jerrold Post, pioneering psychiatrist with more than two decades in the CIA, who created the department that psychologically profiled world leaders and then went on to found the Center for the Analysis of Personality and Political Behavior at George Washington University.  C-Span considered our gathering important enough to broadcast its full three hours.

Then in 2020, immediately in the first month of the Covid pandemic in the U.S., the World Mental Health Coalition issued our first “Prescription for Survival,” which laid out a plan that would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.  With the election looming, I published Profile of a Nation: Trump’s Mind, America’s Soul, in which I not only warned that Donald Trump would “call the election a fraud … and refuse to leave office,” but forewarned against a “shared psychosis” that would spread without proper intervention.  Indeed, this became “the Big Lie.”

In 2021, with Donald Trump no longer in the White House, we began our “Project for National Healing” and held five online town halls with the themes:

· Racism, White Supremacy, and Societal Mental Health

· Dangerous Leadership, the Silencing of Experts, and the Erasure of Truth

· Authoritarian Cults, Shared Psychosis, and Media Indoctrination

· Militarism, Imperialism, and the Future of Democracy

· Structural, Environmental, and Nuclear Violence: One World or None

The goal was to improve conditions for societal mental health, in order to mitigate the “Trump Contagion.” However, without containment of the source, and with continued spread of his pathology—through the vectors of media and social media—what I have come to term, “the mental health pandemic,” continued unabated.

Imagine a viral pandemic sweeping through the land, but the population denying that a pandemic even exists, and rather “dealing” with it by silencing experts and refusing to access public health measures that are already available, even as people are dying and the survival of society is at stake.  Indeed, this is how the U.S. dealt with the Covid pandemic, ending up with more deaths than any other nation in the world, experiencing it as a medieval plague even while possessing modern resources.

A psychic pandemic has similarly spread. Consider where treating Donald Trump as a “normal politician” has gotten us: 4 indictments, 91 charges, 2 impeachments, 1 act of sedition, and threats of civil war; 26 women alleging sexual assault; 1.2 million Americans dead from Covid—and he is the front runner of the Republican Party. In this collective psychosis, we would rather silence mental health experts than hear the truth, and refuse to access the knowledge and interventions that are already known, even as democracy is dying and survival of the nation is at stake.

Enumerated and linked to at my website, bandylee.com, are my own writings and interviews that describe our predicament.  Among the most significant are:

· The Weekend Show, a detailed overview

· Podcast with Bill Moyers

· TEDx Mid-Atlantic: “The Psychology of Dictatorship”

· Speech at Sigmund Freud University

· Mother Jones article: “The Psychiatrist who Warned Us that Donald Trump would Unleash Violence was Absolutely Right”

Throughout 2022 to the present, we have continued our efforts to educate the public, despite the ever-increasing barriers: as mental symptoms grow in severity, “insight” diminishes. Indeed, in psychiatry we measure the seriousness of a mental health crisis by the degree to which a person adamantly denies that one is ill.

So, what must we all do now to attempt to avert “the abyss”? The first answer is education: democracy and self-rule cannot occur without an informed public. As insurmountable as a problem seems, the better we understand it, the clearer the solutions will be.

I will continually to address answers to this question in my writing in the weeks and months ahead, as the very existence of American democracy is threatened, while we fail to address our problem of collective mental health.  And it is the basic question I plan to examine, when my new book can be successfully written and published.