This is not a Daily Kos story by me. It is a transcript the author sent to me with permission to post it here.
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Shortly after the petition signatures soared in a short time to over 10,000, Gartner and Dr. Lance Does appeared on Late Night with Lawrence O’Donnell.
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On Thursday the Duty to Warn group was represented by John at what was called a town meeting at Yale University. Among the panelists was one of the luminaries of the mental health field, psychiatrist and author, Robert Jay Lifton. It was covered in numerous publications here and overseas. I have links to all that I could find on my story yesterday (here).
Yale's statement regarding the recent conference:
The Department of Psychiatry endorses the application of the expertise and experience of its faculty in the service of public policy. In this case, a faculty member in the Department of Psychiatry, Bandy Lee, Ph.D., organized a conference focused on the question of how psychopathology in a national leader should be addressed. She invited nationally-recognized experts in the field of mental health. This group included Robert Jay Lifton, formerly professor of Psychiatry at Yale and an internationally renowned figure in the area of the impact of psychological traumas. The conference participants were specifically instructed to follow the “Goldwater Rule”, which prevent mental health professionals from diagnosing public figures based on second-hand information, i.e., information presented by the public media. The conference was organized by people who focused their presentations on President Trump and who were likely to discuss some of his actions. It was made clear that the opinions presented at the Conference did not represent those of the Department of Psychiatry or the University.
Tom Conroy
Director
Office of Public Affairs and Communications
70 years ago, hundreds of thousands of our grandparents died, to defeat Fascism; but in 2016, Fascism defeated us, without even firing a shot. I know all our colleagues did what they thought ethics required. However, the mental health professions failed to warn the public about a dangerously mentally ill candidate, who they had good reason to know would be a threat to our national security. This will go down as one of the greatest miscalculations in the history of our ( mental health) field.
I keep being haunted by a fantasy: my adult grand children and I are huddled around a garbage can fire, wearing ragged gloves without fingers, slapping our hands together over the flames trying to keep warm. Along with other survivors of World War III, we’re living in a refuge camp in Idaho—one of the last habitable places in America, so remote it was never targeted.
“Grandpa, before The Great Carnage”—that’s what we future survivor call it — “when that madman Trump was rising to power, what did you and the other psychologists try to do about it?"
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“We did nothing.”
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“You must have seen he was insane. What did you say?
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“We said nothing.”
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“You didn’t even try to save the world? You didn’t even speak out?”
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“Well, you see, in 1965 there was a lawsuit against a magazine by a former presidential candidate named Barry Goldwater”
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“Wait, there’s something I don’t understand, grandpa.”
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“You probably don’t know who Barry Goldwater was.”
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“No, I don’t, but back up. What’s a lawsuit?”
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“Oh, well, before the war we had these things called courts, and judges. Kind of like the tribal council we have here at Camp Spud.”
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And then my granddaughter asks, “what’s a magazine?”
It has been said that in every war the generals make new mistakes to correct the old mistakes of the prior war. In 1964, the publishers at Fact magazine printed a survey of psychiatrists, in an article accusing Barry Goldwater of being crazy.
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It simply wasn’t true. He was conservative, but psychologically, he was extremely stable. It was a false positive in statistical parlance, and it was libel. To make sure that never again would such an embarrassing event recur, the American Psychiatric Association gagged all psychiatrists for all time from ever commenting on the mental health of any public figure.
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In response to the many questions from members regarding the 2016 election, the APA reaffirmed in writing that the Goldwater rule was still in force. This led to the opposite mistake—a false negative—a failure to identify for the public a genuinely dangerously disturbed leader. The APA lost sight of a much more important “never again." The "never again" I and many of you were was raised on. Never again should we remain silent while a dangerous authoritarian dictator rises to power. I’m afraid that history will not judge our profession kindly for this tragic mistake.
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The APA would have done much better to consider another lawsuit, one where life and death were at stake, which took place ten year later. In the Tarasoff case, a patient told his psychologist he was planning to kill his girlfriend, and the doctor, citing confidentiality, failed to warn the potential victim before she was murdered. As a result, the duty to warn is law in 33 states, and enshrined in the ethical code of every mental health profession. But if we have a legal and ethical duty to warn one potential victim, how much greater must our ethical burden be if there are millions of potential victims?
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That was the logic that just three months ago, inspired the formation of our organization, Duty to Warn, an association of mental health professionals united by the idea that it our ethical responsibility to warn the public about the dangers posed by Donald Trump’s mental health. Even though we have over a thousand members, today marks our first in-person meeting.
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I’m proud of what we have accomplished in our first hundred days.
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1) We launched a petition among mental health professionals, asserting that Donald Trump is so severely mentally ill that he is incapable of competently discharging his duties as president of the United States, and must be removed under the 25th amendment. 41,000 of our colleagues have signed. And the petition has been widely written about in the media.
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2) We have sought to warn the public by actively alerting the media. A list of publications that have covered the debate around Trump's mental health include: The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Daily News, The New York Post, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Baltimore Sun, the Denver Post, the Des Moines Register, the Charlotte Observer, the Hartford Courant, Time, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, New York Magazine, Cosmopolitan, Elle, Rolling Stone, Wired, The Gothamist The National Review, the American Conservative, The New Republic, Politico, The Hill, The Week, Washington Monthly, The Nation, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fortune, Business Insider, Business Standard, Scientific American, Psychology Today, the Lancet, the British Medical Journal. The APA Monitor, the Chronicle of Higher Education, The Columbia Journalism Review, Slate, Salon, Vox, the Daily Kos, the Huffington Post, and The National Enquirer.
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National broadcast outlets that have covered the story include ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, NPR, HBO, BBC, FOX, CNBC, and MSNBC. It has been covered in at least 20 countries that I know of—more keep popping up.
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A patient I hadn’t talked to in 20 years called me to tell me this week to say his Serbian mother in law saw my picture in the local paper. It was the cover story for two of France’s biggest news weekly magazines. I’m proud to say that approximately a third of these articles quote members of Duty to Warn. And many of the others allude to us, though not always flatteringly.
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3) We have encouraged our members to make contact with their elected representatives thanks to the efforts of Carolyn Dreyfus, our legislative coordinator, who could not be here today. We had an excellent meeting with a staffer from Senator Al Franken’s office. Senator Franken has been outspoken about Trump’s mental health and quoted what we said in that meeting in an interview he gave to the New York Daily News just yesterday, The Hill reported that Oregon Representative Earl Blumenauer is introducing legislation to define the process whereby a president would be removed from office under the 25th amendment for mental illness. I was able to meet with his chief legislative aid at his office in the Capitol, to offer our professional perspective and support for his work. And one of our CT members, Dr. Barbara Lavi who is here today. Wave Barbara. Barbara received a handwritten thank you note from CT representative Jim Himes, stating that he agrees with our clinical assessment of Trump. Himes, as you may know is a member of the House Intelligence committee—a committee that may actually have a say in whether Trump is removed. I’m glad that we could provide some context to inform their work so Representative Himes, and hopefully his colleagues, know who he’s dealing with.
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4) We have signed a contract with an agent to sell an edited book, entitled Duty to Warn, edited by Bandy Lee, Lance Dodes and myself that puts in one volume 25 senior academic psychiatrists and psychologists, and journalists, including two of today’s featured speakers Judith Herman and Robert J. Lifton. They collectively make the case for warning the public about Trump’s illness, explore what that illness might be, discuss how he has damaged the mental health of the large parts of the general public and specific vulnerable populations, and what the dire consequences of his presidency might entail.
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Going forward our goals are to continue:
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1) To Keep building the organization. Today is a step in that direction
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2) To keep garnering signatures for our petition and ultimately deliver it to Vice President Pence and the Cabinet who have the authority to remove Trump under the 25th amendment.
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3) To keep the story alive in the press. Most stories don’t have legs. They are one-offs. But Trump continues to be mentally ill, continues to be president, and will continue to manifest his mental illness in his behavior. Every time he does, we need to point it out, to prevent the abnormal from being normalized. We need to look for news hooks and pounce.
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For example, today the Baltimore Sun, my local paper, should be publishing my op-ed, arguing that Trump’s decision to launch missiles at Syria was impulsive. (The OpEd is here.)
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Quoting myself, I wrote:
“Putting aside whether the missile strike was the appropriate response, what is troubling is the decision-making process. Whether he guessed right or wrong, sudden lethal moves that reverse longstanding policy are disturbing. “Acting on instinct, Trump upends his own Syria policy,” was the headline in the New York Times. The president’s advisers “were clearly uncomfortable with the suggestion that Mr. Trump was acting impulsively.”
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As Ezra Klein put it on Vox, “He is unpredictable and driven by whims. He is unmoored from any coherent philosophy of America’s role in the world. ... What we are seeing, instead, is a foreign policy based on Trump’s gut reactions to the images flashing before him on cable news. And that’s dangerous.” We got away with the Syria strike. We may not be so lucky with North Korea.
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5) Publish and publicize the Duty to Warn book—another opportunity recruit our professional authority to bring the issue to public attention.
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I want to thank you all for coming today. I’m so glad you are here. And I hope you will join us. We also have a very active FB group called Duty to Warn, that you are warmly welcome to join, as well.
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Let us pray, and let us work with all our might, to stop Trump before it’s too late. Before we have to get on the train to Idaho.