Transcript of Emergency Psychiatric Meeting

First of Three Parts from the April 10, 2026, Meeting

Bandy Lee:

Welcome, everyone. For those of you who are new, I am Dr. Bandy Lee, forensic and social psychiatrist and editor of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, a compendium that would eventually include the assessments of 50 psychiatrists and other mental health experts.

The current global situation is extraordinarily dangerous because of severe psychiatric instability in leaders, especially Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. This is not primarily a political crisis, but a medical emergency with potentially catastrophic consequences, risking even the extinction of our species, in the case of nuclear war.

Since 2017, psychiatrists and other mental health experts warned against these risks, but we were silenced. In 2019, we assembled a panel of top mental health professionals and did a standard mental capacity evaluation on Donald Trump, which revealed alarming results that he is not only mentally unfit for the presidency but virtually for any job. Because of this, we were able to predict the exact disordered decision-making pattern we are witnessing today.

We also warned that his disordered thinking could spread socially, through emotional bonds, given our mass media and social media environment. This quickly turned into a “mental health pandemic,” in which a large portion of the population has loosened in its relationship to reality—sometimes called shared psychosis or collective psychosis. We also warned that institutions would be weakened, since the prerequisite to any rational system working is mental capacity. Now, we see that even some of the strongest democratic structures in the world can crumble in the face of mental pathology.

Thus, as a result of the presidential psychiatric crisis not being dealt with, to the point where it has become a psychiatric emergency, we have all exceptionally gathered here today. There has never been in our lifetimes, in human history, the situation in which we find ourselves. Just a few hours ago, Donald Trump again vowed “complete decimation” of Iran. While he has so far pulled out of threats at last minute, there will come a time when, backed into a corner, he may not.

What we need to realize is that, in mental pathology, the extreme self-preservation at the expense of everyone else can also quickly turn into self-destructiveness, where he will not hesitate take everyone else with him. Having exclusive command over nuclear weapons would also give him the means to carry out such a disordered temptation.

Understandably, most people like to believe that all actions—especially coming from a president—are rational. But the threats, reversals, and rhetorical exaggerations we have seen are, unfortunately, not likely to be strategy. They are more consistent with clear patterns of psychiatric symptoms, and when they threaten destruction of the nation and now of the world—we simply have to deal with them as a psychiatric emergency for our own safety. The alternative, in the case of error, carries unacceptable risks of life or death, which no medical professional can lawfully ignore.

Now, before presenting to you an emergency action I and some colleagues are going to pursue, I would like to open the floor for questions.

Audience Member A:

What is it going to take in terms of catastrophe for someone to finally act?

BL:

As we have seen, a bigger catastrophe does not necessarily translate into greater action. We know in psychiatry that the more severe the loss of mental health, so is the loss of the ability to see that something is wrong. That is called loss of insight. And that is why it was so important to prevent what we are seeing today. We have to deal with the situation as it is, not as we wish it to be, and now it involves dealing with a psychiatric emergency with psychiatric principles, not substitutes.

Audience Member B:

Recently, Paul Krugman has stepped forth. How many more experts and of what fields should come forward?

BL:

Economist Jeffrey Sachs, who has been a prominent figure in advising governments, has been stepping forward in a major way, also. We need experts of every field to repeat that expertise in one area does not cross over to another, and that we need to hear from actual mental health experts. They should know more than anyone how odd it is that mental health is the only field about which we are not allowed to hear from real experts—which started with the first Trump administration, for obvious reasons. Yet, mental health issues are perhaps some of the most difficult and intricate to deal with without expertise.

Audience Member C:

What more can we do? Some people treat us like we are in a cult if we mention mental health.

BL:

Yes, it is a natural consequence of what I warned against in the beginning: of silencing mental health professionals and not dealing with psychiatry as a scientific discipline. Now, it has become very scary, and many of you have heard of projection. It is a defense mechanism that tries to reverse who is healthy and who is not. Those who try to point out Donald Trump’s mental problems are accused of, “Trump derangement syndrome,” which is a primary example. This is where expertise becomes critical, because there are verifiable clinical signs and standards of practice that can point out objectively what is medically significant and what is simply deflection.

Audience Member D:

Political science presumed that all nations that had nukes would have rational actors in charge of them. Trump is not a rational actor. What do we do?

BL:

That is right. The doctrine by which we thought that the existence of nuclear weapons could ever be viable, that “mutually assured destruction” would deter both sides from ever using them, has now been demolished. Even when there were two parties, there have been at least thirteen “near accidents” that make the arrangement unacceptable. We need to return to Albert Einstein’s and J.R. Oppenheimer’s original proposal that nuclear weapons come under international control until they are permanently dismantled and banned. Until then, we need to take absolutely seriously the need for mental stability in a leader and almost drop everything else to make this a priority.

Audience Member E:

When Trump was running in 2016, he warned that the Democrats were going to invade Iran and he was the peace candidate. He also describes himself as the most powerful person in the world and at the same time the world’s greatest victim. Who is God and also a victim? Jesus Christ.

BL:

Yes, that is why we warned that his dangerous personality traits would make him prone to using violence, and that he would be a war president, not a peaceful one. He fights his feelings of inadequacy by seeing himself as all powerful, and tries to deny his impairments through the exertion of force. I often state that one does not find any perpetrators in a maximum-security prison but only victims—and violence is most often committed in paranoia, or believing that one is being threatened when one is not. This tendency makes him more dangerous, not less.

Audience Member F:

If a president had a medical condition that was incapacitating, there would be no question that the 25th Amendment could be invoked and that he would be immediately removed from office. My question is, why are lawmakers not seeing a psychiatric emergency in parity with a medical emergency?

BL:

That is exactly right. There is no difference between psychiatric and medical conditions, according to the science, and a psychiatric emergency is a medical one. That is why it was so important for mental health experts to educate the public and to make it be widely known that psychiatric assessments are not just subjective impressions, but we have standard ways of clinically evaluating whether someone is incapacitated. The drafter of the 25th Amendment John Feerick, and his associate John Rogan, together emphasized repeatedly that hearing from psychiatric experts was especially important for the 25th Amendment. In fact, what we are seeing is not just the level of incapacitation of someone in a coma but worse, since his incapacity actively poses a danger and pressures people into not seeing it as a problem.

Audience Member G:

There are men who go into technology, the “tech bros” or the “tech broligarchs”—men who denigrate empathy and just want to act and feel tough. So, there are good developments of looking at the psychopathology of the technology people who are leading our world in this direction.

BL:

Yes, that is right. There is an entire culture that now elevates those with psychopathology. In my twenty-five years of practice, I have seen dangerous personality disorders go from being confined mostly in jails and prisons, to occupying more and more corporate positions, increasingly political positions, and this is how we got Donald Trump. So our democratic safeguards for protecting society are weakening, while a convicted criminal has infiltrated the highest power position of the land to commit violent crimes with impunity. This is why innocent people and truth tellers are being persecuted, as the most vicious criminals are pardoned.

Audience Member H:

There is a taboo on noticing mental and emotional distress. As you know, we are not even allowed to hear from people like yourself, but we are really not even allowed to think about it, because it is like you are denigrating someone if you say something about their mental capacity.

BL:

This is the dramatic shift that happened since ten years ago, when I was actually quite surprised that there seemed to be no stigma! I was called upon as any other expert of any other field, onto all the major network and cable news programs and was on the front page of the New York Times. There seemed to be absolutely no barrier, which I thought was the result of decades of mental health awareness campaigns. That was abruptly and artificially stifled with the American Psychiatric Association’s intervention, falsely calling us “unethical”, saying we were “armchair psychiatrists”—even though diagnosing someone as a patient is not at all the same as pointing out signs of danger for the public’s health and safety, which is our legally-mandated duty.

Now I believe this disinformation campaign was in coordination with the first Trump administration, which immediately rewarded the APA with unprecedented windfalls of federal funding. After our silencing, the public was falsely led to believe that mental health professionals were either unconcerned or unwilling to speak about a dangerous president. The truth, however, was that I was invited to broadcast programs over seventy times, and 100 percent of them were canceled at last minute or recorded but not aired—often to the great surprise of producers or hosts. I was interviewed for thirteen articles in the New York Times, 100 percent of which were published without my quotes. Even the chief editor of the opinion section, who published the newspaper’s first “anonymous” opinion in its history, could not publish any of the opinions he accepted from me! A Washington-based journalist suggested that the APA circulated a “memo” to all news organizations; at the very least, we know that the APA influenced the New York Times after meeting with them.

Audience Member I:

I saw your essay today, where you mentioned you are still being contacted by people in Congress, or I cannot recall if they were people outside of Congress.

BL:

Yes, there are senators who have reached out and in fact asked for a statement from us, which has been signed by some of the most renowned authorities in the field, including Nobel laureates and former department chairs. They entered it into the Congressional record and said it would be brought to the floor next week, I believe. This is to support, I imagine, either impeachment or the 25th Amendment. So, yes, you can contact your senators, whoever they are, because they will be hearing about this issue. Please tell them about the importance of mental health expertise in their decision-making, so that there may be hearings. They are also trying to get our statement to the House of Representatives, which is a separate process, and so you can equally contact your representatives in the House.

Audience Member J:

Can you tell us the person who is making the introduction? Is it a senator?

BL:

Two senators are taking the lead. They are well-known names that will probably reveal themselves next week.

(To be Continued.)

*Please help promote the urgent plea to the four living presidents, discussed in this meeting.

Announcement:

Dr. Bandy X. Lee is in the process of establishing SURVIVAL UNIVERSITY. Please use the contact form to join and to help make this unprecedented effort successful. She is also leading a public course series with Preventing Violence Now, about which you can find out more and register here.