Impeachment is no longer enough, a Yale psychologist who has been leading the “resistance” among mental health professionals now says. Speaker of the House Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) now needs to call emergency services and demand that President Donald Trump be placed on an involuntary psychiatric hold until he can be fully evaluated.
No, seriously.
In an interview with Salon, Dr. Bandy X. Lee, a frequent social media critic of the president who regularly suggests that Trump is suffering from some form of either severe mental illness or all-out psychosis, told the far-left news magazine that Pelosi should abrogate the legislative process of removing Trump from office and simply dial 911 and tell them Trump is a danger to himself and the community and must be institutionalized, even against his will.
“As a coworker, she has the right to have him submit to an involuntary evaluation, but she has not,” Lee said. “Anyone can call 911 to report someone who seems dangerous, and family members are the most typical ones to do so. But so can coworkers, and even passersby on the street. The law dictates who can determine right to treatment, or civil commitment, and in all 50 U.S. states this includes a psychiatrist.”
“I am beginning to believe that a mental health hold, which we have tried to avoid, will become inevitable,” Lee added, as though that were simply the next step in the impeachment process. Pelosi, she said, is uniquely qualified to call EMS to come and take the president to the nearest inpatient mental health facility because she possesses an “objective” view of the president’s behavior — those in the White House and among his senior advisory staff are simply too close to Trump to recognize that he’s a psychopath.
“The advantage of a coworker starting this process is that a court can mandate a mental capacity evaluation before the dangerous person returns to work,” Lee suggested.
Although Lee says she regularly “translates” Trump’s tweets to discover hidden evidence of his psychiatric health, the best evidence of his mental instability, Lee claims, is the six-page letter Trump sent to Pelosi after the House passed articles of impeachment: “First, he is highly unwell, which I am glad many finally seem to see now. More specifically, you can tell how unwell he is by the degree he cannot deviate from his defenses: mainly, denial and projection.”
“A truly sick person will be unable to show any tolerance of ambiguity, doubt or flexibility in thinking. The letter, like his lengthy interviews or his chronic tweeting over years, is unable to show any variation from the characteristic rigidity of pathology,” she claimed in her interview.
She says her assessments are “data-driven,” but they seem to correlate quite well with her ideological leanings. And she seems ready to diagnose any number of legislators with mental illnesses — even Pelosi herself — if they don’t seem as horrified by Trump’s behavior as she is.
Pelosi, Lee says, isn’t moving fast enough to take full control of Trump: “shouldn’t she be responding to [Trump’s mental health] as an emergency? As a coworker, she has the right to have him submit to an involuntary evaluation, but she has not. There is also the common mistake to think that mental impairment and criminality are mutually exclusive, when they have nothing to do with each other, but happening in the same person can cause much greater danger.”
Salon happens to think Lee’s idea is brilliant, but perhaps only because it seems increasingly clear that Trump will remain in office despite what Democrats consider to be their best efforts.