Sometimes it pays not to be a well-known Ivy League shrink. I merely went to Michigan State, got a BA in psychology and an MSW with a clinical emphasis. I never published beyond my own blog and Daily Kos.
The reports that one of the most visible mental health professionals sounding the alarm about Trump’s dangerous mental instability which he has shown, psychologically and cognitively, is getting death threats, thousands of them, is cause for critical pressing concern. They lift the lid off the seething cauldron of hate that Trump has engendered.
Many of you have probably seen Bandy Lee being interviewed. Here she is on Lawrence O’Donnell with Tony Schwartz, author of “The Art of the Deal.”
The reaction that Bandy Lee, MD, a Yale forensic psychiatrist and the editor of “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump demonstrates the - to put it mildly- incivility which Trump has enabled. Incivility, you say? This is the first president who actually encouraged violent acting out during a primary.
Read: "Yale psychiatrist get death threats after claiming Trump poses a danger to the country," published in her hometown newspaper the New Haven Register.
A Yale School of Medicine psychiatrist has received thousands of death threats since she began publicly calling President Donald Trump a danger to the country, she said recently.
Dr. Bandy X. Lee, an “internationally recognized expert on violence,” according to her Yale University profile, said she has received the threats by email, phone and “mostly by Twitter,” though they have “calmed down a little bit,” she said. “I was concerned because I was getting a thousand threatening messages a day at one point,” Lee said.
She (Bandy Lee, MD) briefed about a dozen members of Congress in early December and had dinner with several House Democrats on Jan. 10 at the Washington home of Connecticut U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-3.
I know of several other mental health professionals who have gotten emails or Tweets which threatened them which physical harm.
Most of those who have published articles or been referenced online where comments are allowed have had posters call them quacks and/or threatened to report them for violating the now well-known Goldwater rule. This is expected, it’ par for the course. I have been raked over the coals here on the progressive Daily Kos by a few commenters whenever I wrote about Trump’s mental health.
However, nobody ever threatened me personally.
A death threat, you might say this is aberrant outrageous, but it is also illegal. If Bandy Lee was under the protection of the Secret Service, whoever made the threat would be investigated without delay.
Trump routinely encouraged violent behavior during his rallies, and a few people actually took this as a license to physically attack ant-Trump protestors. For example:
Excerpt:
Racial slurs, nasty rhetoric and violence at Trump rallies have become commonplace against protesters, bystanders, and reporters. Assaults are committed not only by rowdy Trump fans, but by the staff he employs to keep the events safe. But rather than denounce these incidents, Trump is making them part of his brand, and uses them to rev up crowds.
“There may be somebody with tomatoes in the audience,” Trump warned people at a rally in Iowa last month. “If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously. Okay? Just knock the hell — I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees.”
Trump has even threatened to personally get in on the action. “I’d like to punch him in the face, I’ll tell ya,” he said of a protester on Feb. 22.
He has also gone far beyond “mere” misogynism to bragging that he physically assaulted women
Trump’s belittling Tweets against anyone who criticizes him, taken en toto, add up to bullying, and bullying in extremis results in violence.
The appalling irony of this is that the recipient of this rash of death threats is aimed at a female psychiatrist who is an expert on violence, and something not often noted, but adding to the egregiousness of these threats also has her master’s degree in divinity.
For much more online about psychotherapists warning about Donald Trump in various ways Google Trump with the names Lee, Gartner, Dodes, Francis, Lifton, Gilligan, Zimbardo, Yale Conference, and for a modest few hits, Google me.