Profile of a Nation: The Mind of Donald Trump
Join Kristin for an incredible show with Dr. Bandy Lee, speaking today about the process she and many other prominent psychiatrists undertook from an apolitical look at the mental health of Donald Trump. We ask the question, “What does a nation do when the leader of their country displays behavior that deems them unfit and unsafe for office?”
Dr. Bandy Lee discusses her most well-known book, “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President” and here today to introduce us to her new book, “Profile of a Nation: Trump’s Mind, America’s Soul.”
Dr. Bandy Lee is a medical doctor, a forensic psychiatrist, and a world expert on violence. She became known to the public by leading a group of mental health professional colleagues in breaking the silence about the current U.S. president’s dangerous mental impairments. She is currently president of the World Mental Health Coalition, which is dedicated to promoting public health and safety.
During medical school, she also obtained a divinity degree to expand her understanding of the human condition. Trained at Yale and Harvard Universities, she was chief resident at Massachusetts General Hospital and a research fellow at the National Institute of Mental Health. As a faculty member of the Law and Psychiatry Division at Yale School of Medicine for 17 years, she taught at Yale Law School for 15 of those years, covering the mental health aspects of asylum law, criminal justice, and veterans’ legal services. Her clinical work consists of psychiatric services at maximum-security prisons and in state hospitals, in addition to working as an expert witness for the state and federal courts. Currently, she holds medical licenses in four states.
She served as Director of Research for the Center for the Study of Violence (Harvard, U. Penn., N.Y.U., and Yale), co-founded Yale’s Violence and Health Study Group at the MacMillan Center for International Studies, and has led an academic collaborators project for the World Health Organization’s Violence Prevention Alliance, helping to translate scholarship into implementation and to support research in low- and middle-income countries. She has consulted with governments on prison reform and community violence prevention, such as for France, Ireland, Alabama, California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York. She has also played a key role in initiating reforms at Rikers Island, a correctional facility in New York City known for extreme levels of violence.
She created a popular Global Health Studies course at Yale College, “Violence: Causes and Cures,” which led to the most comprehensive textbook on the subject to date, “Violence: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Causes, Consequences, and Cures” (Wiley-Blackwell, 2019). She published over 100 peer-reviewed articles and chapters, 15 edited scholarly books and journal special issues, over 200 op-eds in outlets such as the Guardian, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Independent, and Politico, and the New York Times bestseller, “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President” (Macmillan, 2017 and 2019). The last proceeded from an ethics conference at Yale School of Medicine, which led her to consulting with over 50 members of the U.S. Congress.
The World Mental Health Coalition is a professional organization that assembles mental health experts to collaborate with other disciplines for the betterment of public mental health. It also attempts to step in where the American Psychiatric Association has failed in societal leadership. Her current goals center around educating the public on mental health matters that have national and international consequence, so that it can be empowered to protect itself.
She owes a great debt to her maternal grandfather, Dr. Geun-Young Lee, a renowned physician who helped inspire many in reconstructing South Korean society after the war, and to her mother, who continued to practice his philosophy in her beloved United States.
