Bandy X. Lee
4 min readMar 5, 2020

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At Your Request, a Mental Health Report on Joe Biden

Since you keep asking, here is my report on Joseph R. Biden Jr.:

I do not diagnose without examination and do not speak about public figures in general, unless there is evidence of such profound danger to public health and well-being because of serious signs of mental instability in a public servant, that it would be a public disservice not to share my knowledge and training. Biden has not risen to this threshold. A few stumbled words are not the same as the extreme dangers that result from: delusions of grandeur, omnipotence, and impunity; pathological lying to the level where almost no truth can be found in any of his words; making up fake news and threatening anyone who would contradict him, including calling legitimate news sources “the enemy of the people”; encouraging and promoting violence; traumatizing children and expressing glee at others’ suffering; belligerence against enemy and allied nations in ways that have dramatically worsened geopolitical instability; near-complete lack of empathy and detachment from reality; programming and hypnotizing his followers to believe only his words and not “what you’re seeing and what you’re reading”; neurological emergency-level slurring of speech, movement abnormalities, frequent memory lapses, dramatically shrinking vocabulary, repetitions, tangential thinking, or loss of direction; and stumbled words.

That I have not volunteered reports “on both sides” should be proof that this is not a political exercise. I never spoke up about a president or a presidential candidate either…

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Bandy X. Lee

Forensic psychiatrist, violence expert, president of the World Mental Health Coalition (worldmhc.org), and New York Times bestselling author.