Bandy Lee is an internationally recognized expert on violence. Trained in medicine and psychiatry at Yale and Harvard Universities, and in medical anthropology as a fellow of the National Institute of Mental Health, she is currently on the faculty of Yale School of Medicine’s Law and Psychiatry Division.Lee is the organizer of A Duty to Warn and editor of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.
From her Q&A with Slate's Isaac Chotiner:
What was the response from people in your profession to your book, and what is the state of the debate on some of the issues you were trying to raise?--Marshal Zeringue
The book actually incurred an enormous response. It was an instant New York Times best-seller. For a multi-authored specialized knowledge book, this was rather surprising.
For those within our field, within mental health, we had garnered a lot of respect after the book came out. Those who have specialized knowledge will know that we kept the standard quite high, to, you might say, peer-reviewed standards, while still making the language accessible. And we removed all financial conflicts of interest. In other words, none of us are taking any profit from the book. And all of the income is being donated for the service of public mental health.
What was the main thing you were trying to get across in the book?
The initial impression for those who don’t read the book is that we’re diagnosing and we’re violating ethics. But people who have read the book would come back to us and state that they were really astonished by the ethical rigor and just how accurate and rigorous our assessment was.
The message is basically that we wanted the public to know of the dangers we saw. Dangerousness is different from diagnosis, so we tried to explain that. But the main crux is that the situation is...[read on]