Bandy X. Lee
Bandy Xenobia Lee is an American psychiatrist whose scholarly work includes the writing of a comprehensive textbook on violence. She is a specialist in public health approaches to violence prevention who consulted with the World Health Organization and initiated reforms at New York's Rikers Island Correctional Facility. She helped draft the United Nations chapter on "Violence Against Children," leads a project group for the World Health Organization's Violence Prevention Alliance, and has contributed to prison reform in the United States and around the world. She taught at Yale School of Medicine and Yale Law School  from 2003 through 2020. In 2017, Lee organized a conference at Yale on professional ethics surrounding the mental health of Donald Trump, with luminaries of psychiatry such as Robert Jay Lifton and Judith Lewis Herman. She withheld her views at the conference, but later she harshly criticized the American Psychiatric Association for changing an ethical guideline called the Goldwater rule following concerns raised among professional peers about the Trump presidency. In March 2017, the association had expanded the rule to restrict not just diagnosis, but any comment related to the mental health of public figures absent a personal examination, calling  it a "reaffirmation". This change alarmed Lee and her colleagues enough to prompt convening the conference the next month, and later in the year editing "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump", a book of essays warning about the dangers of Trump's mental instability that became a "New York Times" bestseller. She donated all revenues from the book to the public good to remove conflicts of interest. In 2020, Yale University fired Lee for breaking the Goldwater rule, even though she is not a member of the American Psychiatric Association, the only mental health association that has the rule. She  resigned her membership in 2007 after learning that the association was taking 30 percent of its revenues from the pharmaceutical industry. Meanwhile, a former president and current member of the American Psychiatric Association, who is a major critic of Lee, retains his position at Columbia University despite being under investigation for violating the Goldwater rule. The only difference is that his violation favored Donald Trump. Lee's lawyers responded to a second motion to dismiss by Yale, after the first one failed. Early life and education. Bandy Lee was born and raised in the Bronx, New York. She is of  Korean descent. Her mother was Inmyung Lee. As a teenager, Lee volunteered in Harlem as a tutor for homeless African-American children. Her grandfather was Geun-Young Lee, a respected physician after the Korean War, who Lee says inspired her with a belief that practicing medicine also involves social responsibility. Lee received her M.D. from the Yale University School of Medicine in 1994 and a Master of Divinity (M.Div.) from Yale Divinity School in 1995. Lee completed her medical internship at the Bellevue Hospital Center in New York. During her medical residency at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Lee was designated  as the chief resident. She was then a research fellow at Harvard Medical School. Career. Lee studied the anthropology of violence in East Africa as a fellow of the National Institute of Mental Health and co-authored academic papers on Côte d'Ivoire, Tanzania, and Rwanda. She is a specialist in violence prevention programs in prisons and in the community and worked for several years in maximum security prisons in the United States where she was instrumental in initiating reforms at New York's Rikers Island jail complex. She has consulted with five different U.S. states on prison reform. Lee was  director of research for the Center for the Study of Violence and with Kaveh Khoshnood, founded Yale University's Violence and Health Study Group. She heads a project group of the Violence Prevention Alliance for the World Health Organization that contributes to increasing the evidence base on interventions that work to prevent interpersonal violence in low- and middle-income countries. She helped draft United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan's chapter on "Violence Against Children" and is the author of the textbook, "Violence: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Causes, Consequences, and Cures". Comments on Donald Trump. In April 2017, Lee hosted  a meeting at Yale University medical school to discuss the ethics of speaking about the mental health of Donald Trump. The assembled, prominent psychiatrists decided they had a "duty to warn". Following the conference, in an interview with "Salon" in May 2017, Lee stated that Trump suffered from mental health issues and due to his holding the office of president, the issues amount to a "state of emergency" and that "our survival as a species may be at stake", She also discussed her views that link what she sees as increasing inequality in the United States to a deterioration in  collective mental health. Later in 2017, she was the editor of "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump", a book of essays alleging that Trump suffers from psychological problems that make him dangerous. After the book's publication, she reported receiving thousands of threatening messages by letter, telephone, and on social media that included death threats. In December 2017, she met 12 members of the United States Congress (11 Democrats, 1 Republican) to give them her opinion on Trump's mental health, in which she reportedly argued that he was "unraveling". In a letter to the "New England Journal of Medicine , Jeffrey Lieberman, past president of the APA, argued that Lee and her co-authors were guilty of a misguided and dangerous morality". This was in spite of the fact that another prominent psychiatrist and former chair of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, had said, "When I first heard about the conference that gave rise to this book at Yale, I was worried that a manifesto would come out with a diagnosis... That is not what happened: what happened is a very thoughtful assessment based on lots of public data." Lieberman, rather, was reported to have diagnosed Trump , the very act he accused Lee and colleagues of committing. Lieberman was instrumental to shutting down what had by that time become "the number one topic of national discussion." Lee's colleagues argued that the Goldwater Rule has become a "gag rule" and made recommendations about making corrections to it. Lee emphasized that, when meeting with lawmakers, she was adhering to the American Psychiatric Association's guideline, which precedes the Goldwater rule, and which urges psychiatrists "to serve society by advising and consulting with the executive, legislative, and judiciary branches of the government." In an interview she also said, "whenever  the Goldwater rule is mentioned, we should also refer to the Declaration of Geneva, established by the World Medical Association 25 years earlier, which mandates physicians to speak up if there are humanitarian reasons to do so. This Declaration was created in response to the experience of Nazism." Since that time, two investigative articles have exposed the APA actions as taken to use the Goldwater rule to protect its federal funding under the Trump administration, as its own officer admitted on a previous occasion. Lieberman was one of the beneficiaries. Trump's niece, psychologist Mary L. Trump, who wrote a  book asserting that her uncle suffered from severe psychological problems, called the rule "absurd on its face [with] potentially serious consequences for the safety of the American people". Lee stated, "Americans had to learn to do without expertise, just as it has with the pandemic, and the results have been equally devastating." She gave a blow-by-blow account that showed how mental health experts predicted the mismanagement of a pandemic that exceeded a half-million deaths, shortly following the end of the Trump presidency. A Columbia University study, a Lancet Commission, and a member of Trump's own White  House Coronavirus Task Force confirmed the former president's central role in a large portion of these deaths. In her "Profile of a Nation", published on October 1, 2020, Lee warned of a violent reaction after an election loss, stating, "he is truly someone who would do anything, no matter how terrible, no matter how destructive, to stay in power." Bill Moyers, who interviewed her shortly after the January 6, 2021 Trump-incited U.S. Capitol attack, called her "the least surprised person in the country." He had praised her 2017 book as "profound, illuminating and discomforting." On January 9, 2021 , Lee was among World Mental Health Coalition colleagues who called for quick removal of Trump from office, and made recommendations regarding how to encourage his loyal followers to fall away from his influence. On January 17, 2021, Lee and Jeffrey D. Sachs authored an opinion, "One Group Who Knew All Along How Dangerous Trump Was: Mental Health Experts", in which they proposed changes to the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution in order to "address dangerous psychological disorders, and taking steps to reduce the powers of the presidency so that the nation is not vulnerable to the whims  of one mentally unbalanced individual", as well as, changes to the restraining standards imposed on members of the American Psychiatric Association in such circumstances. Termination from Yale University. On January 2, 2020, after attorney Alan Dershowitz's response to a woman who sued him for sexual assault was to say that he had a "perfect" sex life, observers noted his language echoed Trump's comment about having a "perfect" telephone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Lee tweeted in response, "Alan Dershowitz’s employing the odd use of 'perfect'—not even a synonym—might be dismissed as ordinary influence in most  contexts. However, given the severity and spread of 'shared psychosis' among just about all of Donald Trump’s followers, a different scenario is more likely... Which scenario? That he has wholly taken on Trump’s symptoms by contagion. There is even proof: his bravado toward his opponent with a question about his own sex life—in a way that is irrelevant to the actual lawsuit—shows the same grandiosity and delusional-level impunity." Dershowitz publicly objected to Lee's characterization, writing, "Dr. Bandy Lee has never met me, never examined me, never seen my medical records, and never spoken to  anyone close to me. Yet she is prepared to offer a diagnosis of 'psychosis' which she attributes to my being one of President Trump's 'followers.' ...Indeed, Dr. Lee went even further, diagnosing 'the severity and spread of "shared psychosis" among just about all of Donald Trump's followers.' ...She is literally claiming that we are mentally ill and our views should be considered symptoms of our illness, rather than as legitimate ideas." According to Lee, Dershowitz also e-mailed officials at Yale, stating, "This constitutes a serious violation of the ethics rules of the American Psychiatric Association. I am  formally asking that association to discipline Dr. Lee." According to Lee, John Krystal, chair of the psychiatry department at Yale, immediately warned her that the department would terminate her teaching role at Yale if her behavior did not change. She requested an investigation but did not hear back until her termination letter on May 17, 2020. After multiple appeals, Krystal in a September 4, 2020, letter gave as reasons for Lee's termination: "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." It may  also have been a response to a letter by Gregory Scholtz, the president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), also dated September 4, 2020: "The interest of our Association in the case of Dr. Lee arises from its longstanding commitment to basic tenets of academic freedom and due process... Under the 1940 "Statement", 'College and university teachers are citizens, members of a learned profession, and officers of an educational institution.  When they speak or write as citizens, they should be free from institutional censorship or discipline... [e]xtramural utterances rarely bear upon the faculty member’s fitness for continuing  service.'" In March 2021, Lee sued Yale University over the termination, claiming breach of contract, breach of good faith and wrongful termination. In response to the news, Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School tweeted, "This is a disgusting way for any university to act. Dr. Bandy Lee should never have been fired." Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University stated, "Yale blundered badly by siding with the APA's gag rule rather than the right—indeed responsibility—of its faculty to speak out against a dangerous president." Cornel West, who himself said he was recently denied tenure at Harvard because of his  speech, stated, "I wholeheartedly stand in solidarity with Bandy Lee, a brilliant and wonderful sister and professor!" A letter signed by prominent colleagues asked Krystal, "[Since] contributors to this book which Dr. Lee edited include many scholars and international exemplars of psychiatric ethics, we wonder if they too would be terminated were they to be members of your department." Several op-eds on academic freedom and the Goldwater Rule were published by prominent public intellectuals, and at least two petitions are in motion for Lee's reinstatement. Yale University has since come under fire for its stance on academic freedom , while Lee has received other faculty invitations. Yale University lawyers submitted two motions to dismiss but were denied. Since then, the judge on her case was changed without statement of a reason, and the case has stalled for three months without explanation.