WhoWhatWhy - There’s a forensic psychiatrist at Harvard who argues that the deeply dangerous behavior of Donald Trump and his MAGA followers can best be understood — and combatted — as a national mental-health crisis. Dr. Bandy X. Lee, a faculty member in Harvard’s Program in Psychiatry and the Law, minces no words in labeling Trump a pathological liar:
The effect of pathological lying … is to inundate public discourse until … truth no longer matters, the public is “gaslit” to disorientation, and his audience conditioned to accept fantastical assertions that are no longer tethered to reality.
Lee has a few critics in psychiatric circles; they claim she violates a principle of her specialty, or skirts too close to the line, by diagnosing a public figure whom she has never privately interviewed as a patient. Lee says she does not do that (and ‘pathological liar’ is not an official diagnosis in the field’s manual).
Moreover, to Lee, and the many psychiatrists and other professionals who take her side, silence is not an option with the fate of the nation at stake. “No one with Donald Trump’s impairments,” she says, ”would be hired by a private corporation or by the military, the police, or the government civil service.”
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