Who the heck is (Dr.) Bandy X. Lee?

TUESDAY, MAY 16, 2023

It's time to revisit this topic: Who the heck is (Dr.) Bandy X. Lee? 

It's time to revisit this topic. The leading authority on her life starts us off with this impressive thumbnail:

Bandy Xenobia Lee is an American psychiatrist whose scholarly work includes the writing of a comprehensive textbook on violence. She is a specialist in public health approaches to violence prevention who consulted with the World Health Organization and initiated reforms at New York's Rikers Island Correctional Facility. She helped draft the United Nations chapter on "Violence Against Children," leads a project group for the World Health Organization's Violence Prevention Alliance, and has contributed to prison reform in the United States and around the world. She taught at Yale School of Medicine and Yale Law School from 2003 through 2020.

[...] 

Bandy Lee was born and raised in the Bronx, New York. She is of Korean descent. As a teenager, Lee volunteered in Harlem as a tutor for homeless African-American children. Her grandfather was Geun-Young Lee, a physician who treated patients in need of care after the Korean War, who Lee says inspired her with a belief that practicing medicine also involves social responsibility.

Lee received her M.D. from the Yale University School of Medicine in 1994 and a Master of Divinity (M.Div.) from Yale Divinity School in 1995. Lee completed her medical internship at the Bellevue Hospital Center in New York. During her medical residency at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Lee was designated as the chief resident. She was then a research fellow at Harvard Medical School. Upon completion, she was offered a faculty position at Harvard University but turned it down to return to Yale.

For the record, Lee is about to turn 53. In this passage, we're reminded of her recent work concerning the matter of Donald J. Trump:

In 2017, Lee organized a conference at Yale on the mental health of Donald Trump with the participation of other psychiatrists including Robert Jay Lifton and Judith Lewis Herman. Following the conference, in March 2017, the American Psychiatric Association released a statement reaffirming the Goldwater rule that restricts comments related to the mental health of public figures without their consent or evaluation. Lee characterized the statement as silencing concerns raised by psychiatrists about the Trump presidency.

Lee reconvened the conference the following month, and later in the year edited The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, a collection of essays warning about the dangers of Trump's mental instability that became a New York Times bestseller...

In 2017 and 2018, Lee met with over fifty U.S. Congress members who considered the 25th Amendment and in 2019 held an interdisciplinary conference at the National Press Club, which discussed impeachment and was broadcast in full by C-SPAN.

As noted above, Lee edited The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, a collection of essays warning about the dangers of Trump's mental instability. 

The book became a New York Times bestseller. As best we can tell, the book has never been reviewed by the New York Times.

We've never seen Dr. Lee interviewed on MSNBC. Yesterday afternoon, Nicolle Wallace burned two segments of Deadline: White House interviewing Emilio Estevez and Martin Sheen about a film they made in 2010 and have decided to re-release.

Piffle like that makes fine cable fare, but Lee's work mustn't be mentioned. 

We mention Lee because of the increasingly bizarre behavior of Donald J. Trump. We've recommended pity for this apparently disordered man, but it's important that disordered people of this type be kept from attaining societal or political power.

As far as we know, you've never seen Dr. Lee interviewed on MSNBC. The hosts our flailing blue tribe loves are paid millions of dollars per year to obey the suits in such ways.

(You aren't allowed to know how many millions of dollars.)

Yesterday, we linked you to Dr. Lee's new essay at Medium. Today, we link you to it again, especially taking note of this brief passage:

"Approximately 4 percent of the U.S. population have sociopathy (6 percent of adult men and 2 percent of adult women). Approximately 25 percent of those with sociopathy have psychopathy: in other words, about 1 percent of the U.S. population (1.2 percent of adult men and 0.3 to 0.7 percent of adult women)."

Six percent of adult males can be diagnosed as "sociopaths." For about a quarter of such disordered people, the diagnosis can get even worse.

We've cited statistics like that before, but the people who tell you the stories you like don't think you need to wonder about such things. They refuse to interview people like Dr. Lee about matters of the highest importance.

There's much more to say about this topic. Lee has discussed the medical specialist's "duty to warn." For today, we'll discuss the literate citizen's duty to report and question.

Also, why not this: Last fall, Joshua Kendall wrote a lengthy profile of Lee for Mother Jones. It appeared beneath these headlines:

The Psychiatrist Who Warned Us That Donald Trump Would Unleash Violence Was Absolutely Right
The vindication of Bandy Lee.

For the record—as part of Dr. Lee's vindication, she has been fired by Yale.

Kendall discusses these matters with fluency. Why not give his profile a look?