When Society’s Safety Is at Stake: A Rule of Law Symposium and Psychiatry’s Societal Role

By Bandy X. Lee and Claire Pouncey

Disappearance of mental health professionals from public discourse

“The Goldwater rule,” previously a trivia question for psychiatric parlor games, suddenly took foremost prominence under the Trump presidency, becoming a household phrase for the public and then official or unofficial policy for major media organizations, enforced not only against American Psychiatric Association (APA) members but all mental health professionals, sometimes even applied to non-professionals. All this happened within the first year of Donald Trump’s presidency, shortly after the APA, in a sweeping pronouncement declared all comment about the then-president’s mental health as “armchair psychiatry” and “use of psychiatry as a political tool,” attributable to “self-aggrandizing purposes.”

The APA was referring to the book Lee and colleagues coauthored, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, cautiously written after a vigorous ethical debate at Yale School of Medicine that decided a psychiatrist’s duty to public health and safety was more important than an etiquette owed to a public figure. The conference caught the attention of Congress members, and the psychiatrists consulted with over fifty of them at their or intermediaries’ request, who made clear that their ability to act politically depended on psychiatrists’ ability to educate the public medically.

What happened over the more than three years since is now history. Media…