The Dangerous Case of Bandy X. Lee
6th July 2023
The former Yale psychiatry professor Bandy X. Lee spent the four years of the Trump presidency trying to convince Congress to remove him from office on mental health grounds. She was not the only shrink advocating the president’s removal, whether via special congressional committee or the invocation of the 25th Amendment (which removes power from the president if he is unable to perform his duties). But she was far and away the most prominent. She convened a notorious Yale conference on the presidential wits in early 2017 that resulted in a diagnostic book of that year called The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.
Having failed to convince elected leaders to enact her agenda through, as she called it, “the [Mueller] special counsel’s report, impeachment, or the 25th Amendment,” she told the Mark Levin Show in 2019 “my last resort is to be a service to the public.” That meant launching a campaign to remove President Trump via the administrative declaration of a public health emergency that would suspend democratic rights nationwide due to what she called a “Trump mental health pandemic.” Although she rejoiced that “the healthy part of the population” won the 2020 election, making the emergency declaration unnecessary, the reprieve was temporary. It was urgent, she said, that Congress enact special measures to prevent anyone of Trump’s ilk from gaining office again given that half of the national electorate was, in her view, unfit to vote.
On June 20, Lee lost her appeal in federal court against a lower court ruling that upheld Yale’s decision of 2020 not to renew her courtesy appointment as a clinical professor. The reasons for the Yale decision are both technical and substantive. Lee was not a regular faculty member, so she could not appeal to academic freedom or even full-time employment protections. She had become a nuisance at Yale because of her repeated violations of the basic rule of psychiatry, namely that one should examine a “patient” before delivering a diagnosis, even if they are a public figure.