Back for another round eviscerating professional ethics, Yale University psychiatrist Dr. Bandy X. Lee continues her partisan assault besmirching her profession to take cheap shots at the president. This time around, Lee exploited Dr. John Zinner to deviate from ethical standards to diagnose 74-year-old President Donald Trump, the same way Lee violated every ethical principle in 2016 to diagnose Trump as a “malignant narcissist,” equating him with historical mass murders like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Mao Zedong and other heinous political figures responsible for millions of innocent deaths. Lee baited Zinner into an interview where he asked him whether he agreed with Dr. Mary L. Trump who misrepresents herself as a clinical psychologist. Mary Trump holds no professional license to diagnose anyone let alone her own family.
Mary’s controversial book, “Too much and Never Enough: How my family created the world’s most dangerous man” landed her on many anti-Trump TV and radio shows, preaching her hate to the choir. “We are being struck by the perfect storm, a combination of a deadly pandemic combined with an utter failure in leadership by the very person who should have been in charge of preventing this terrible national emergency,” Zinner told Lee. Zinner can’t possibly think as an educated physician that the president is responsible for a global pandemic started in China. Whatever his gripes with Trump, what possible expertise does he have to comment about the coronavirus AKA SARS CoV-2 or Covid-19 global pandemic? Opining about Trump’s management of the Covid-19 crisis is beyond Zinner’s pay grade as a psychiatrist who “researched narcissistic personality disorders.”
Making egregiously unethical statements has been par for the course since Trump first announced as president in 2015. Lee has been the worst offender, actually creating a phony network of mental health professionals to denounce Trump as a “malignant narcissist” before the 2016 election. “Donald Trump has failed us because he is, as he has always been incompetent, and he suffers from extremely severe mental disorders, which render him incapable of attending to any issue beyond his won personal need for adulation” Zinner said, showing that he’s starved for publicity or doesn’t practice his profession’s own ethical standards. Diagnosing over the Intenet or on radio or TV talk shows with like-minded partisans is inexcusable for anyone holding a state license to practice psychiatry or anything else. Mary Trump holds no state license to practice and can slander anyone she likes.
Lee and Zinner know they’ve never evaluated Trump, only used their psychiatric profession to besmirch public figures. Zinner calls Trump “incompetent,” but by anyone’s standards, he’s been one of the nation’s most successful real estate investors. Trump NBC TV shows “The Apprentice” or “Celebrity Apprentice” were highly successfully reality TV shows, making millions for Trump and NBCUniversal now Comcast. If that sounds “incompetent” to Zinner, then he needs his head examined. “The mental condition he suffers most from is formally known as a severe instance of narcissistic personality disorder,” the same thing Lee diagnosed Trump with back in 2016. How Yale University or the American Psychiatric Assn. can let Lee or Zinner get away with this is anyone’s guess. Zinner called Trump an “existential threat” to the world, the exact same argument used by Lee in 2016.
During Trump three-and-a-half-years in office, he’s deescalated U.S. involvements in foreign wars. Unlike former President and Democrat nominee Joe Biden who, working along side of former President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, toppled Libya and supplied arms-and-cash for eight years to Syrian rebels, causing over 500,000 deaths, displacing 15 million Syrians to neighboring countries and Europe. No such wars have taken place under Trump’s watch, yet Zinner calls Trump an “existential threat.” Zinner, like Lee, is another political hack that doesn’t have the common sense to stop using his strictly regulated profession to advance his political agenda. Lee urged Congress to remove Trump under that 25th Amendment citing his “mental illness” or lack of fitness to serve in the capacity as president of the United States.
Since the American Psychiatric and Psychological Assns. cannot control their members, it’s up to state licensing boards to put rogue professionals on notice that they cannot diagnose public figures because they don’t like their politics. “The basic guidelines for the ethical cannons say that a psychiatrist’s responsibility, ‘first and foremost,’ is to his or her patients and to society and to his colleagues and himself,” Lee said. How Lee construes from that that she has a duty to warn society for her own political biases or anxiety is anyone’s guess. There’s simply no excuse for any licensed professional to breach every ethical standard for politics. If Lee or Zinner think they’re saving the world from a menace, then who are the ones suffering from grandiosity? Lee and Zinner are political hacks using their professions to unethically to attack Trump, something strictly forbidden in their fields.
