Who Am I? And Why Have I Spoken Up?

Time for Me to Summarize, Clarify, and Explain

I started with one word: Dangerous.  Just a few years ago, I was primarily known in my field of violence prevention as a forensic psychiatrist and an internationally-recognized expert who had worked with the most dangerous individuals our society produces.  My textbook, Violence: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Causes, Consequences, and Cures, is considered the most comprehensive and authoritative in the field and is widely used at the university level.

In addition to my doctorate in medicine, I also have a master of divinity degree, both from Yale.  I interned at Bellevue, was chief resident at Massachusetts General Hospital, and was a research fellow at Harvard Medical School and the National Institute of Mental Health.  I worked in maximum-security prisons across the country and played a key role in initiating reforms at Rikers Island.  Just before prison reform swept through the U.S. and beyond, I was consulting with five state and four national governments on violence prevention programming in prisons.

I cofounded Yale’s Violence and Health Working Group and led a project group for the World Health Organization’s Violence Prevention Alliance.  For seventeen years, I taught courses such as criminal justice clinic and immigration legal services at Yale Law School, as well as a university-wide course on violence prevention for Yale’s Global Health Studies program.  I have written over 100 peer-reviewed articles and have edited seventeen academic books, in addition to authoring my textbook on violence.  Hence, I was well-positioned to speak about the spread of violence when Donald Trump became president.

Immediately, I was flooded with emails and phone calls because of my area of expertise.  Having devoted my twenty-year career to studying, predicting, and preventing violence, not to respond to the dire situation would have been political.  As a medical professional, one of my foremost ethical responsibilities is public health and societal safety; I had no prior political engagements or affiliations.  And to overlook the obvious potential for great violence, as well as dangers to the survival of the human species, simply because it was inconvenient to speak up, would have been contrary to the Hippocratic Oath, the Geneva Declaration, and the core tenets of psychiatric ethics.

The concerns I and my psychiatric colleagues had were about public health and violence prevention.  We realized it also coincided with a major civic responsibility to alert the nation to the dangers of having someone of such extreme mental impairments in a position of presidential and military authority and powers.

What was important to recognize was that his impairments were not just another political ideology or “style”, but pathology.  Far from using psychiatry “as a political tool,” as did the Soviets and the Chinese, we were doing the opposite: attempting to educate the public so that the powers-that-be could not exploit the psychiatric situation.  None of this had anything to do with “diagnosing” Donald Trump; diagnosis is something one does for a patient, in order to provide individual treatment.

What we did was to try to alert the leaders of our country, the media, and the public at large, in order to help them prepare for what we believed and continue to believe was a uniquely serious and dangerous public health crisis resulting from handing too much power to someone who was mentally incapable of handling it.  The unprecedented public endangerment from the Covid pandemic, whereby more than a million Americans unnecessarily died, is only the most visible part.  There is an even more serious “Trump contagion,” which is actually a psychic pandemic whereby all manner of destruction—including the demise of democracy—can, is, and will spread, far after Donald Trump is gone, unless we address it for what it is.

Indeed, the corrupted American Psychiatric Association (APA), from which I resigned in 2007 because of its corruption, has behaved more like an instrument of Soviet or Chinese psychiatry: perverting psychiatry in service of the State.  Most of the public is unaware that it was spreading disinformation when it called mental health experts who would speak up as “unethical” or said that we were “diagnosing” (warning against danger is not diagnosing but a public service).  Rather, the APA formulated all manner of opinions about us public figures it never examined, in order to shut us out of public discourse—in other words, it spared no subterfuge to serve its political agenda of silencing us.

Once it intimidated and discredited mental health experts, it got the major media to fear reporting about our medical consensus and concerns.  When we went from being the number one topic of national conversation, meeting with dozens of Congress members, and having the public looking to us for management of a psychiatric situation, to total absence from public forums within weeks of the APA’s intervention—the APA had played its tragic role.  At a time when there was hardly a scientific organization that was not bled dry, unless it was willing to buck science to tote Trump’s talking points in defiance of science, the APA emerged triumphantly! Not only did it receive unprecedented federal funding under Donald Trump for its willingness to compromise, it was able to move headquarters from Virginia to one of the trendiest neighborhoods in Washington, DC—to rub shoulders with the biggest lobbyists.

Had I been asked by a Court to do a mental fitness evaluation (it is never the personal physician who does this, by the way—as Ronny Jackson unethically did—but an independent, Court-appointed forensic psychiatrist), or had I been asked by a Board of Directors to evaluate the executive’s capacity to make rational decisions and to handle crisis situations without placing others in danger, I would not have been able to answer in the affirmative.  Indeed, we actually did such an examination (a fitness exam does not always require a personal interview, since it is a functional test), and Donald Trump failed every criterion.

As a result of what has happened since I began speaking up about Trump, I am much more aware of what I call the great dangers of “Ultimate Violence”—the great global dangers to human survival, and the devastating impacts of “Trump Contagion.”  Soon, I will expand on these thoughts in a follow-up essay about Who I Am Now and What I Am Going to Speak Up about Now.  And maybe, as I have been encouraged to do, if a new publisher can be found, I will be writing a major follow-up to the bestselling book we published in 2017.  This sequel may be titled, The More Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Update their Assessments.