Yale Psychiatrist Who Declared Trump Mentally Unfit Has Been Fired, and She’s Suing
“your repeated violations of the APA’s Goldwater Rule and your inappropriate transfer of the duty to warn from the treatment setting to national politics raised significant doubts about your understanding of crucial ethical and legal principles in psychiatry”
Bandy Lee, the psychiatrist who repeatedly diagnosed Trump as mentally unfit and dangerous, without ever even having met him, has apparently been fired by Yale University.
What a shame.
At one point, Lee’s frequent long-distance diagnoses extended to Professor Alan Dershowitz. He wrote a strongly worded letter to Yale, which apparently played a role.
This all began unfolding last spring, but we’re just finding out now.
Yale Daily News reports:
Former professor says Yale fired her over tweet on Trump, Dershowitz
Bandy Lee MED ’94 DIV ’95, a formerly Yale-affiliated faculty member in the Department of Psychiatry in School of Medicine, filed a complaint against the University on Monday alleging “unlawful termination… due to her exercise of free speech about the dangers of Donald Trump’s presidency.”
University spokesperson Karen Peart declined to comment on the specifics of the case. Yale was the only named defendant.
Lee’s complaint alleges that Yale fired her in response to a January 2020 tweet that characterized “just about all” of former president Donald Trump’s supporters as suffering from “shared psychosis” and said that Alan Dershowitz, a lawyer on Trump’s legal team, had “wholly taken on Trump’s symptoms by contagion.” Dershowitz responded to the tweet with a letter to Yale administrators, in which he complained that Lee’s tweet constituted “a serious violation of the ethics rules of the American Psychiatric Association” and requested that she be disciplined.
Diagnosing people from afar is a big no-no in psychiatry. They even have a description for that. It’s called the ‘Goldwater Rule.’
Lee’s superiors at Yale warned her about it, and it looks as though that was one of the factors in her firing:
“Although the committee does not doubt that you are acting on the basis of your personal moral code,” the letter read, “your repeated violations of the APA’s Goldwater Rule and your inappropriate transfer of the duty to warn from the treatment setting to national politics raised significant doubts about your understanding of crucial ethical and legal principles in psychiatry.”
The American Psychiatric Association’s Goldwater Rule states that it is unethical for psychiatrists to comment on a public figure’s mental faculties in an official capacity unless granted permission or after a medical examination.
The timing of this is ironic. I recently had a brief exchange with Lee on Twitter that ended predictably:
The Yale psychiatrist who repeatedly declared Trump mentally unfit for office just blocked me for calling her out. Oh well. pic.twitter.com/URunFEewSa
— Mike LaChance (@MikeLaChance33) March 22, 2021
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Comments
Good.
But they let her get away with it only until Alan Dershowitz sent that letter because they didn’t fear Trump suing but they knew Dershowitz would have no problem filing a lawsuit and winning that lawsuit.
They may have expected her to come to her senses and knock it off/apologize or perhaps they tried to persuade her to do that voluntarily before resorting to firing her.
FWIW – A significant portion of mental health professions enter the profession because they are trying to address there own mental issues. both lee & C Blassy Ford is a prime examples.
Now if we can deal with the mental health professionals that seem fit to falsely diagnose the mentally ill with the phantom transgender diagnosis
Part of the problem is that the mental health profession itself is in need of major reform. The Replication Crisis currently plaguing the soft sciences was first identified in psychology, and it hasn’t gotten any better. Their flagship diagnostic manual is highly influenced by social norms by design.
The changes to diagnostic criteria over the last couple of decades are brought about by the professionals within the field, so it’s a bit of a chicken-or-the-egg problem when it comes to reform.
I don’t see any way out of the ‘social norms’ since psychology has to identify what is “abnormal.”
Very good and poignant points—I’ve been aware of this very sick, hate-filled woman for more than two years. The past president of the APA remarked concerning Lee: “ Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman, former president of the APA, not only denounced Dr. Lee’s book as a compilation of “tawdry, indulgent, fatuous tabloid psychiatry” but obliterated her claim of having a “duty to warn,” adding that medical professionals have repeatedly been used throughout history for corrupt political agendas.“
In a letter to the editors of the New England Journal of Medicine, Lieberman says he believes Lee, [Dr. Claire] Pouncey, and the rest are “acting in good faith and are convinced they are fulfilling a moral obligation.” But the history of psychiatry is littered with examples of mental health professionals being “exploited” for political purposes, he wrote, citing doctors who gave cover to Nazi eugenics policies and those who helped confine dissidents to mental hospitals in the People’s Republic of China.
“Although moral and civic imperatives justify citizens’ speaking out against injustices of government and its leaders, that does not mean that psychiatrists can use their medical credentials to brand elected officials with neuropsychiatric diagnoses without sufficient evidence and appropriate circumstances,” he wrote. “To do so undermines the profession’s integrity and credibility.”. Mad World News blog put it this way: “ Dr. Lee is not only inching toward losing her credibility and career, she’s also portraying herself as mentally unfit to be a psychiatrist, thanks to her maniacal ramblings suggesting that President Donald Trump will destroy the earth and everything in it. If there’s one thing we can learn from Dr. Lee, it’s that the patients are definitely running the asylum.” This is the current quality of educated morons being turned loose upon civilization—and parents are paying large fortunes to send their children to become indoctrinated thusly in these nests of moral rot.
It seems like many people in psychiatry are there because they are themselves not so stable. In this case she fell into the collective psychoses of Trump Derangement Syndrome. It consumed her, and has now ruined her. She canceled herself.
These are the people the Dems want to assess whether you can possess a firearm.
I believe that the desired mental test essentially goes like this:
Q. Do you wish to own a firearm?
A. Yes.
Decision: Mentally unfit.
I suspect the Yale administrators began warning her earlier on, but (as is usual in any bureaucracy) there is a process. Of course, Mr. Dershowitz can be a bit of a legal cattle prod…
Yale’s medical school has a new dean. Maybe she decided this unprofessional behavior was cause for termination.
As President, Donald J. Trump is most certainly a “public person”, a “celebrity” who requires a very high standard for successfully filing suit for defamation. While Alan Dershowitz is publicly known, he falls far below the level of “celebrity” which grants a defamer essential carte blanche to say most anything about him. AND, Dershowitz has shown himself ready and willing to file defamation suit. He may also have shown Yale there was a route to culpability for the school for tolerating the Goldwater violations while Lee was on faculty and being touted as a “Yale Professor of Psychiatry” in her pronouncements on the mental health of President Trump and Dershowitz.
If it weren’t for double standards, Cancel Vultures like her wouldn’t have any at all.
It is interesting that they waited until Trump was no longer in office before they fired her.
She was useful for a time.
Should have been done BEFORE the election. We all know why it wasn’t.
Better late than never, now I am hoping she is sued, that she ends up a pauper, and that eventually someone with post a picture of her begging for food on some street corner.
Sued for what? As far as has been reported she hasn’t done anything illegal.
Getting sued can also happen over violations of professional and ethical standards. You wouldn’t know about those.
SDN, you can go to Hell. You wouldn’t know anything about truth or honesty or decency. She hasn’t done anything illegal, so there is nothing anyone can sue her for. That is a fact. If you think otherwise tell us who you think could sue her, and for what.
Fuzzy, I am talking about the topic of this discussion, which is JD’s statement that “now I am hoping she is sued, that she ends up a pauper, and that eventually someone with post a picture of her begging for food on some street corner.” I asked what she could possibly be sued for, and rather than serious answers, all I’m getting is SDN’s personal abuse and your irrelevantly talking about ethics.
Whether she behaved unethically is a matter of opinion; the APA and Yale say yes, she says no, and her opinion is just as good as theirs. But even if her opinion is wrong, she can’t be sued for it, so it’s irrelevant to the discussion.
Agreed.
Perhaps not illegal, but it’s certainly unethical for a psychiatrist or other medical professional to “diagnose” people they’ve only seen on TV. That, I think, is the problem Yale and shrink set had with her, not that it was Trump, just that she can’t diagnose people she’s never met. Seems a legit complaint to me.
That’s the APA’s opinion, and it’s Yale’s opinion. Their opinions are not the law, so there is nothing she can be sued for, which is the entire point we are discussing.
As for the ethical question, she disagrees with the APA and with Yale, as is her right. She doesn’t think she’s done anything wrong, and legally her opinion is just as good as anyone else’s.
Neither Yale nor the APA is suing her, Milhouse. What are you talking about?
Fuzzy,
I’m baffled by this apparent “new” Milhouse. New icon, new attitude and new tendency to resort to that prime feature of the Left, obscenity laden retort.
Perhaps I’m mistaken. I used to disagree as much, or sometimes more, with Milhouse than agree with him but when he was correct, and I saw the comment, I noted it. I don’t recollect a tendency to use obscenity, but then I’m old and perhaps that is simply a failure of short term memory.
It’s not new, Edward, but we try to cull the overtly ad hominem attacks on fellow readers as quickly as possible, so maybe you just missed the window when they were there? I don’t know. I do know that everyone is very anxious and upset and frustrated and angry right now, so let’s all try to cut each other some slack.
I’m baffled by this apparent “new” Milhouse
I’m not.
If, every single time I came to a community based on one of my interests, I was dogpiled by semi-literate halfwits slinging insults and profanity – not because I was insulting anyone; not because I was saying things that were untrue; not because I was saying something offensive, but because they simply didn’t like that what I was saying was provably and unambiguously true – well, then, I might be inclined to start slinging a little profanity back myself.
People who are so triggered by legal analysis on a legal blog that they resort to childish schoolyard insults might want to look at their motivations for hanging out on a legal blog.
You do realize you don’t have to do anything illegal to be sued, right?
If one is willing to spend the money, there is always something which can be twisted into a lawsuit.
You’re clearly confusing criminal law with civil law. First, anyone can sue anyone else for anything. It happens every day. Second, I suspect Dershowitz would (justifiably) sue her for defamation, and he would most likely win. You don’t have to commit a crime to violate the law. Indeed, the vast majority of lawsuits have nothing whatsoever to do with criminal activity.
This story LIT-trally made me laugh out loud. I really did. Thanks for brightening my day.
Couldn’t have happened to a lovelier person. /s Really surprised she didn’t lose her medical license over her quackery (assuming she has one).
She has one; why should she have lost it? The “Goldwater Rule” is an internal rule of one private organization; I don’t even know whether she was ever a member.
Are you suggesting there is no standard of ethics associated with a license to practice psychiatryt? Then I wonder what in the world Derschovitz was complaining about. Whiner.
Whatever ethical standards there may be in NY, they are certainly not set by the APA, which has no more legal standing than the Legal Insurrection moderators. Dershowitz didn’t sue her or take any legal action against her, he simply complained to Yale that she had behaved unethically, as is his right. Yale agreed, as is its right. It fired her, and now the court is to determine whether it had that right.
There are no ethical standards in New York, if that helps advance the discussion.
The private association to which Outhouse refers plays the same role in licensing for psychiatrists that the Bar Association does for lawyers, or the AMA for doctors. The term is professional standards; he wouldn’t know about those.
In other words no role at all. Doctors do not have to have anything to do with the AMA, nor do lawyers have to have anything to do with the ABA; they are both completely private organizations with no legal authority at all. And the same is true for the APA. Bandy Lee has no obligation, legal or ethical, to be a member or to pay it any attention.
(In some states, the legislature has granted legal authority to the state bar association. That is a completely different matter and is not relevant here. )
SDN, you are a damned fraud and a piece of shit. Go to Hell and go there quickly.
Is that you, Bandy?
I think you meant to reply to SDN, and hit the wrong button.
Nope, I hit the right button. Your passionate defense of this nutcase makes one think you two are one and the same.
ROPER: So! Now you’d give the Devil benefit of law!
MORE: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
ROPER: Yes! I’d cut down every law in England to do that!
MORE: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?
This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast — man’s laws, not God’s — and if you cut them down — and you’re just the man to do it — do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?
Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!
It isn’t clear that she has a medical license. I looked into this when she first became news. The public records of Connecticut are searchable on-line, and I couldn’t find a medical license listed for her (I know other physicians at Yale and was able to find theirs, so I’m reasonably certain my search skills were adequate). I’ve read that she might have a New York license, but those records aren’t searchable on-line that I can find.
Those records are searchable online, and she did indeed have a NY license. Still does, for that matter.
It may be time for you to make an appt with her. Maybe she’ll diagnose you ??
Why would I need an appointment for that? The whole point is that she doesn’t need to see people to diagnose them. So making an appointment with her is like telling the Psychic Hotline your credit card number; surely they should already know it!
She has both a medical degree (MD) and a masters in divinity (i kid you not). But since she wasn’t a practicing psychologist at Yale but simply a professor teaching classes she doesn’t need a state license. She wasn’t practicing psychology.
She dug her own grave with her public pronouncements.
She will likely lose, too, but if her case is not dismissed after the pleading stage, will get her chance to scream racism.
They finally realized that she is mentally unfit to teach – even by Yale’s cratered standards.
Useful idiots of the left, be warned: you are not only disposable,but the first to be disposed of – fasicts don’t want rebels in their new Junta.
It’s only public because she’s suing, and lawsuits are public.
She’s only suing because they’re disposing of her, as the rebel who kept calling Trump nuts.
I am so shocked
This is my shocked face 🙂
This is mine: ?
My reaction: I’m jumping up and down with indifference.
Long overdue, but good for Yale for dumping this incompetent and unethical woman at last. She is a disgrace to both the psychiatric and the teaching professions.
Yes, but imagine her superiors: the freaks who urged her and supported her in her ambitions in her public trashing of PDJT, while hiding behind Yale.
At bests, she seems to be good at ‘school’ – meaning, she has a good memory and knows how to study, and tests well. But otherwise, she’s only good for aping what she was taught to suckers.
Then she got cocky, and became an opportunist – and an ever bigger useful idiot. Then she became evern more useful, as Yale’s sacrificial lamb, so Yale can show the world the people running it are not as sick as this hack. But they are.
Yale hasn’t changed its spots. It just thought it prudent to camuflage itself because of the heat two freaks called Biden-Harris will bring upon the left.
Peter Butthead is the left’s new ‘trial balloon’: he has the honor of sticking his Alfred E. Neuman face into cameras and pronounce the most unconstitutional, fascist ideas of the left, to see if they stick. After all, Butthead is “too short and too gay” to be president. (Right, obama?)
https://www.theblaze.com/news/obama-buttigieg-gay-short
She’s earned this. I hope she goes broke with her frivolous lawsuit.
So, how long before her race comes up?
Well done. Horowitz has liberated Bandy to practice her free speech without the legal and ethical burdens of working for Yale, those bigots.
“Shared psychosis” might be the “sluggish schizophrenia” of “modern” left wing political psychiatry.
What kind of parent would name his/her child “Bandy?”
When I was just out of high school my cousin and I were two of three sisters, one of whom was named Lettie.
I’m confused: your cousin was your sister?
It’s a southern thing…
Family tree has one branch?
“Free speech?”
Muh private educational institution, harridan.
If you don’t like it, you can always start your own Yale.
Guessing it won’t be a whiter shade of Yale…
That, or she’ll try, but take a complete Schlagging and end up with nothing. So, Weiser heads will tell her not to bother. I doubt, though, that she will Master the concept.
/I think I’m getting worse…
Took me a moment to unlock the code…
I’m glad you eventually tumbled to it…
I like how you slipped the poco harem song in there
She was always an insane Useful Idiot, and now the Useful part is at its end.
Perhaps Kamala Harris is in need of her remote services
I took a couple psychology classes and my diagnosis from afar is that Bandy X. Lee is mentally unstable.
And better yet, no license, so you’re not breaking anybody’s rule!
Yes, but more of an opportunist.
I heard her try to debate Mark Levin. Really pathetic. I’m sort of convinced she has Asperger’s Syndrome and perseverates on President Trump. That Yale kept her while she was running around spewing crap is very telling. Don’t fund these ‘schools’.
She has a solid career with MSNBC or CNN. Ethics violations are a plus.
I’m confident somebody on The View will be aging out soon.
Hey Bandy can you say “Hi Joe, you want happy ending?”
This may help her in future. It was taught in my Transgender Mongolian Poetry and Dance Interpretation Studies Class. We had to memorize this line:
“Do you want fries with that?”
The irony is delicious here. The person demanding someone be removed from their position is now upset because they were removed from their position.
I love it when Karma bites you in the ass.
As undeserved as it is, they will almost certainly give her a payoff to make the lawsuit go away.
Useful idiot Lee is no longer useful to the elites.
Good riddance, vile POS Bandy!
As a nurse for 25 years my considered professional opinion is; “LOLOLOLOLOL, Good somebody finally smacked this Quack.”
Caption Contest Entry: “George Takei’s had some work done.”
I believe that MS Lee finally became such an embarrassment to the Liberal and Psychiatric communities (excuse my redundancy) that they tried to distance themselves from her in a number of ways including a professional reprimand. For an excellent accounting of the disturbing extremes that she went to, to condemn Trump I recommend the report titled “The Method In The Madness” on the American Greatness blog.
I wonder if she would have been gone faster or slower had she been an equal opportunity diagnoser, including Biden, who appears to be more compromised than Trump. However, in Biden’s case, I think he may be suffering from the long term consequences of two brain surgeries for aneurysms is 1988, one of which had burst – so maybe a diagnosis for a neurologist, not someone in the psych field.
If I am not mistaken, when she first started diagnosing Trump from afar an investigation of her qualifications revealed she was not licensed to practice psychiatry in any state. Unless that is no longer the case, she is going to have a bit of trouble setting up a practice.
Actually this is not true. Back when all this started the line is that she wasn’t licensed in Ct. which was and is true, but she has always maintained her medical license in New York. You don’t need a license to teach.
I was academic faculty in neurology and psychiatry for over five decades. In every faculty code of conduct, etc., those provisions in faculty contracts ALWAYS specifically state that the faculty member will adhere at all times to professional conduct requirements regardless of how they may be promulgated. It doesn’t matter whether or not Bandy Ex-Lee was a member of APsychiatricAssoc—it sets the code of conduct for the profession through published standards of conduct. She apparently broke the Goldwater Rule, and that is one thing that a faculty cannot ignore. In light of an extremely well known alumnus pointing out her deficiencies, Yale was forced to act. Dershowitz correctly pointed out that a Goldwater violation is also a breach of ethics under all state licensing boards. She was doomed when she went after him, but it pains me that it took a famous alumnus to finally point out the obvious to what used to be a good medical school.
Actually, you DO need a license to teach CLINICALLY. I have no idea what her teaching duties were, but were she doing rotations with students and supervising residents and/or fellows, she would have to be licensed.
Academic lectures are an anomaly to that general rule. You correctly point out that licensing may not be required, but it is subject to individual institution requirements.
In general, to teach any area of medicine in Texas—you have to be licensed.
Texas isn’t relevant to Yale.
I was academic faculty in neurology and psychiatry for over five decades. In every faculty code of conduct, etc., those provisions in faculty contracts ALWAYS specifically state that the faculty member will adhere at all times to professional conduct requirements regardless of how they may be promulgated. It doesn’t matter whether or not Bandy Ex-Lee was a member of APsychiatricAssoc—it sets the code of conduct for the profession through published standards of conduct. She apparently broke the Goldwater Rule, and that is one thing that a faculty cannot ignore. In light of an extremely well known alumnus pointing out her deficiencies, Yale was forced to act. Dershowitz correctly pointed out that a Goldwater violation is also a breach of ethics under all state licensing boards. She was doomed when she went after him, but it pains me that it took a famous alumnus to finally point out the obvious to what used to be a good medical school.
Says who? Does her contract with Yale explicitly name that code as binding on her? What makes the APA’s code more relevant than that of the American Psychological Association, or any other body?
Since when? Has the NY medical licensing entity ever proclaimed that the APA code is binding on NY doctors who practice psychiatry?
I think the real problem is that she breached the “Thou shalt not embarrass the school or leave it open to lawsuit” rule.
Even though the school has been doing a pretty good job of that all on it’s own.
Milhouse, your entire argument has been based on the nonsensical notion that people can only be sued if they break the law. What a buffoon!
And here I was so looking forward to her deeply insightful analysis of Uncle Joe.
/snort
She is the very definition of a Useful Idiot. Once they were done using her they tossed this steaming pile of used Alpo into the trash cuz she was stinking up the joint!
So Bandy X. apparently wasn’t a permanent faculty member at Yale but simply an unpaid “voluntary faculty member” trading a small amount of teaching duties for being able to claim a Yale Faculty affiliation who was not re-appointed to that voluntary position due to her unprofessional conduct.
Source:
https://www.nhregister.com/news/article/Ex-Yale-psychiatrist-who-criticized-Trump-16047079.php
She was always projecting.
There are psychological causes for the psychiatrist’s behaviors. See Lyle H Rossiter’s The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes for Political Madness. In short, Liberals suffer from an superior complex. Also, see the Dunning Kruger effect.
Schadenfreude. Yes. I’m pleased to congratulate Bandy Lee on her singular, well-deserved honor. She has brought a lot of joy into a lot of peoples lives. Took long enough!
Couldn’t have happened to a meaner person
Mulhouse, in re: “ it’s her opinion and it’s just as good as any professional group of thousands of psych professionals” – err, nope. It isn’t.
If you or I claim that Trump is deranged on some obscure website that’s one thing. But for a supposed medical professional to violate an almost universally held professional standard to diagnose someone without the required work steps is another thing entirely. Then to do paid appearances touting this “diagnosis” for political purposes is putting the cherry on top.
The “Goldwater Rule” isn’t some recent thing, it’s a long-standing professional psych standard to prevent medical science being bastardized for political or personal gain. It doesn’t just protect the famous and politicians from slanderous and flimsy diagnoses. I still recall when my sister finally decided to divorce her 2nd husband he tried to get her diagnosed as crazy – because in his mind only a crazy person wouldn’t want to stay married to him. Not too long ago he might have been able to swing that by spending enuf money with the right head doc.
Diagnosing people of opposing political stances as medically unfit to hold office (or vote, or remain free) has a long sad history in psychiatry and is in fact often some weird marriage of malpractice and slander. Either of which could serve as a lawsuit basis.