Bandy X. Lee, Expert on Mass Psychosis

Dr. Bandy Xenobia Lee is an American psychiatrist whose scholarly work includes a 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 WHO’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 to 2020 and then at Harvard Medical School until 2024.

Publications

• Profile of a Nation: Trump’s Mind, America’s Soul (author)
• The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump (editor, contributor)
• Violence: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Causes, Consequences, and Cures (author)

In 2017, Lee organized a conference at Yale on the mental health of Donald Trump. Participating psychiatrists included Robert Jay Lifton and Judith Lewis Herman. After the conference, in March 2017, the American Psychiatric Association released a statement reaffirming the Goldwater rule that restricts comments related to public figures’ mental health without their consent or evaluation. Lee characterized the statement as silencing concerns raised by psychiatrists about the Trump presidency and violating the more important Geneva Declaration.

Lee reconvened the conference the next month, and later in the year edited The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, a collection of essays warning about Trump’s mental instability that became a New York Times bestseller. It was reported that White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly secretly consulted the book as a guide for dealing with Trump. Using it as an “owner’s manual”, he intervened to stop Trump from ordering the use of nuclear weapons.

Editorial Note

As discovered in the modern era by Babiak & Hare (2006), easily confirmed by an appropriate survey of polling statistics, the manifestation of a psychopath’s projected mass psychosis across the electorate falls into three distinct categories corresponding to the cognotypes of the target audience: acolytes are the most susceptible and instinctively align with the demagogue’s narrative; skeptics preferentially oppose the demagogue’s narrative; and agnostics can’t seem to discriminate between a demagogue and any other politician in a business suit and are easily swayed for or against the demagogue’s narrative. As I argue under Granfalloons and Cognotypes, these cognotypes in their proportions are the manifestation of an evolutionary equilibrium distribution because the only alternative explanation is that God made it that way.

I qualify the foregoing paragraph by “in the modern era” because of a passage in Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching (6th Century BCE, Chapter 50 in the standard arrangement): Three in ten follow life and three follow death. Another three pursue life to excess, pushing themselves closer at every turn to the place of death. While it isn’t clear for obvious reasons that Lao Tzu had mass psychosis in mind as we understand it today, it is overwhelmingly likely that he perceived the three cognotypes as distinct phenotypes because of the way he saw them responding to the conflicting influences of everyday life. As in the case of the cognotypes themselves, the reason we can understand this is for lack of an alternative rational explanation.