The Inquisitive Media

Six Years Later, the New York Times Acknowledges the Elephant in the Room

Finally, on November 22, 2023, after years of siding with the American Psychiatric Association in condemning psychiatrists and other mental health experts for speaking out, the New York Times allowed for a single article to be published on the dangerous psychology of Donald Trump, from the perspective of actual experts.

The respected journalist, Thomas Edsall, states in his column:

Looking over the eight-and-a-half years during which Trump has been directly engaged in presidential politics, it’s not as if there were no warning signs.

Three months after Trump took office, in April 2017, a conference called “A Duty to Warn” was held at the Yale School of Medicine.

The conference resulted in a best-selling book, “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.”

The elephant in Ivan Krylov’s proverbial museum was actually mental health experts. And Edsall has admirably affirmed:

The warnings that Donald Trump is dangerous and unstable … continued throughout Trump’s four years in the White House, and remain relentless as he gets older and more delusional about the outcome of the 2020 election.

However, even Edsall seems not to have been able to publish my quotes or even to mention my name.  He wrote to me, apparently as one of his first interviewees, and asked for contacts of my colleagues, whom he included.  The Times has consistently and unfailingly deleted my quotes before the publication of at least twelve articles—and now thirteen, if this is what happened here—by journalists quite senior and well-respected.  One of them, in fact, some consider to be the most renowned of Times reporters, and he still could not keep my quotes in his articles, to his great alarm.

Whereas my exclusion does not detract greatly from the current article—which is excellent—all other times I was the only mental health expert consulted.  And whereas I am encouraged that the Times has finally included our voices, I cannot help but notice that my continued exclusion is a barometer for our society.  The Times’ current complicity echoes and mirrors its silence and complicity in Adolf Hitler’s time (the New York Times has been criticized for contributing to the underestimation of Hitler in public discourse and for relegating his atrocities to its back pages, apparently in an effort to maintain access to Germany).

I say so because, on January 10, 2018, the New York Times dealt a decisive death blow to our public education efforts, when it opposed us in the strongest possible terms, issuing the following statement through its Editorial Board:

Is Donald Trump mentally fit to be president of the United States?...

It’s beside the point not because a president’s mental capacity doesn’t matter, nor because we should blindly accept our leaders’ declarations of their own stability, let alone genius.  Rather, we don’t need a medical degree or a psychiatric diagnosis to tell us what is wrong with Mr. Trump.  It’s obvious to anyone who listens to him speak, reads his tweets and sees the effects of his behavior….

Unfortunately, a number of psychiatrists … who should know better have increasingly taken up the Trump-is-crazy line.  In “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” released last October, more than two dozen contributors, mostly mental-health professionals, concluded that Mr. Trump presents a grave and immediate danger to the safety of America and the world.  No argument there, but why do we need to hear it from psychiatrists relying on their professional credentials?  Dr. Bandy Lee … said the authors are “assessing dangerousness, not making a diagnosis.”  Anyone with access to newspapers or Mr. Trump’s Twitter feed can do the same…. There’s a good reason the profession established an ethical guideline in 1973, known as the Goldwater Rule….

The rest of the rambling article is circular, nonsensical reasoning as to how “the public already knows” what psychiatrists are speaking about, but we should not speak, lest we cause the public to see things differently.  After blocking a review of our book, despite its being a New York Times bestseller, the only psychiatrists populating the Times columns were those giving one absurd reason after another as to why psychiatrists should not speak (even “the Goldwater rule” was never meant to override our primary responsibility for safety!).  The only expert analysis the Times allowed was by the now-disgraced Jeffrey Lieberman, who claimed, against medical consensus, that Donald Trump was “just a jerk” and not a serious problem.  His full column was published next to the article by the Editorial Board.

We found out that the Board met with representatives of the American Psychiatric Association, no doubt through Lieberman’s crusades. Outraged at the column, the immediate past president of the Editorial Board himself requested that the Board meet with us.  To his great surprise, he was refused because, “we already did [meet with psychiatrists].”

Even the editorial column’s chief editor, who published the only “anonymous” Times article to date, attempted twice to publish an opinion piece by me.  He found to his great shock that he could not—even after assuring me that he would be able to, and that there was no “policy” against me.

Policy or not—which I would argue that there is—I witnessed what happened after the New York Times’ January 10, 2018, article.  All other media fell in line, for the Times established the “go to” reason why mental health experts should be the only experts not to be aired in public.

Will the New York Times be able to reverse its reprehensible position of January 2018 through a column in November 2023?  From its continued exclusion of my quotes, and its Editorial Board’s silence, I would say not—and this does not bode well for the country.  A few of us remember, in 2017, when our unusual Times bestseller catapulted us to the number one topic of national conversation.  The most prominent network and cable news programs eagerly invited us, even surprising me with their total absence of stigma.  I interviewed nonstop, fifteen hours a day, for weeks.  More than fifty U.S. Congress members asked to consult with us, and based on our success in public discourse, relied on us to “educate the public medically,” so that they could “act politically.”  Indeed, respected senior journalists counted our efforts to have all but completed tilting the scale toward action.  All this changed when the American Psychiatric Association newly generated stigma by publicly denouncing us—seemingly to preserve its own access to power—and the New York Times relied on it to create a blackout from the media—which had an almost immediate effect.  The most critical and existential discussion of our time was suppressed, precisely for our influence. That is how we arrived at what Brian Klaas, quoted by Thomas Edsall, describes as the “banality of crazy.”