There will not be a book published this fall more urgent, important,
or controversial than The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, the work of 27
psychiatrists, psychologists and mental
health experts to assess President Trump’s mental health. They had come
together last March at a conference at Yale University to wrestle with
two questions. One was on countless minds across the country: “What’s
wrong with him?” The second was directed to their own code of ethics:
“Does Professional Responsibility Include a Duty to Warn” if they
conclude the president to be dangerously unfit?
As mental health professionals, these men and women respect the
long-standing “Goldwater rule” which inhibits them from diagnosing
public figures whom they have not personally examined. At the same time,
as explained by Dr. Bandy X Lee, who teaches law and psychiatry at Yale
School of Medicine, the rule does not have a countervailing rule that
directs what to do when the risk of harm from remaining silent outweighs
the damage that could result from speaking about a public figure —
“which in this case, could even be the greatest possible harm.” It is an
old and difficult moral issue that requires a great exertion of
conscience. Their decision: “We respect the rule, we deem it subordinate
to the single most important principle that guides our professional
conduct: that we hold our responsibility to human life and well-being as
paramount." Hence, this profound, illuminating and discomforting book
undertaken as “a duty to warn.”
The foreword is by one of
America’s leading psychohistorians, Robert Jay Lifton. He is renowned
for his studies of people under stress — for books such as Death in
Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (1967), Home from the War: Vietnam Veterans
— Neither Victims nor Executioners (1973), and The Nazi Doctors:
Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (1986). The Nazi Doctors
was the first in-depth study of how medical professionals rationalized
their participation in the Holocaust, from the early stages of the
Hitler’s euthanasia project to extermination camps.
U.S. President Donald Trump participates in a joint news conference with
Amir Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah of Kuwait, September 7, 2017.
(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
