The strange (legal) case of psychiatrist Bandy Lee

Note the blog archives are in the right column. The most recent stories are all political. They are:

• Trump like Scrooge McDuck swimming in document loot
• Watch His Waistline: Measuring Trump's stress level
• Trump wants his supporters to die for him.
• Scroll down further and you'll find stories like this one about bathroom art a a nearby restaurant. 

The strange (legal) case of psychiatrist Bandy Lee

This story was also published (here) on Daily Kos where it hopefully will prompt some comments.

Bandy X. Lee, MD, MDiv is well known among those who follow books, articles, and television coverage of how Donald Trump's psychopathology makes him, as the book she edited proclaims him, a dangerous case.

She is currently in the news.

Click above to enlarge image

This all began with her with a legal case which began with the following precipitated by the media hog par excellence and thin skinned Alan Dershowitz :

CANCEL CULTURE New York Magazine  DEC. 30, 2021

She Tweeted That Alan Dershowitz Might Be Acting Crazy. So Yale Fired Her.

 

The strange free-speech case of Bandy Lee.

Now some 10 months later the case has been adjudicated. This is the legal result as reported in The Yale Daily News:

Bandy Lee attempted to contest her being dismissed from this voluntary but important position at Yale University but a federal judge ruled against her.

Bandy Lee complaint dismissed by federal judge; Lee says she will appeal

“I won’t stop,” said the psychiatrist, who had alleged wrongful firing over tweets about Alan Dershowitz and tied her case to broader issues of academic freedom.

This was reported, I suspect with some satisfaction, on Rupert Murdoch's NY Post as follows:

Click above for article. Note that the paper misspelled her first name.

One aspect of her association with Yale which has been reported I wasn't aware of. I thought she was a regular paid member of their faculty working at least as an adjunct professor not on the tenure track. I don't know if she had a formal teaching role but this was reported: The reason the school said she was eventually let go was due to lack of a formal teaching role, the New Haven Register reported. Importantly, Lee responded to this in this tweet:

(a) 80-90% medical faculty are voluntary; and (b) “no teaching role” was decided on after firing, not before.

I was disabused of my assumption about her role at Yale being more active after reading several articles about this. It was reported in The Hartford Courant (subscription required) but referenced by the NY Post:

While Lee wasn’t paid, she claimed the Yale gig was worth potentially tens of thousands of dollars in perks and exposure that allowed her to consult globally, the Courant reported.

It took one day for Wikipedia to update their entry on her:

In 2020, Yale University did not renew Lee's volunteer position for breaking the Goldwater rule in her evaluations of Trump.^[13] Lee sued Yale for violating her academic freedom,^[14] but the suit was dismissed in August 2022

Bandy Lee often referenced her association with Yale and this, in my opinion, gave her a great deal of credibility. Here's a 2020 article about her from The Yale Daily News:

PROFILE: Dr. Bandy Lee and the psychiatric case against Donald Trump

 In fact, Dr, Lee was the driving force behind a conference back in 2017  where mental health professionals presented on subjected related to why Trump represented a danger to democracy. See article:

Click above to article

Other prominent mental health professionals in the media include clinical psychologist John D. Gartner who (according to his Wikipedia page) was a part-time professor, until 2015, for 28 years at Johns Hopkins University Medical School. Another is psychiatrist Lance Dodes, a training and supervising analyst emeritus of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and a retired assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

These credentials certainly lent substantial bonafides to their opinions especially compared to other mental health professionals like me who have published opinions whose educational backgrounds are more pedestrian. For example, I was a clinical social worker and the director of a small mental health center who received my MSW degree from Michigan State University.

Bandy Lee's website  which has many informative links doesn't have any abut this ruling (at least not that I can find):

As of this writing the news coverage section of her website hasn't been updated with this latest unfortunate development. However Dr. Lee has tweeted her response:

Click above

I don't know how much of a chance an appeal of this decision will have. I'll leave that to those with a modicum of legal expertise. My own off-the-cuff opinion is that the law favors the right of a university to fire any non-tenured member of the faculty whether an unpaid volunteer or a paid instructor or non-tenured assistant professor without cause. I wish it could be a free speech case and then I think she'd have a good chance of winning on appeal but I am afraid it isn't.

Read previous blog posts by clicking links in column on right >

Trump like Scrooge McDuck swimming in document loot

Today's recommended recommended story: Watch the Medhi Hasan video in this story: 

Biden's MAGA warning drowned out: Republicans' hissy fit works to distract the media, by one of my favorite writers, Heather "Digby" Parton

Yesterday, below is my story.. I haven't thought of anything to write about today. Don;t forget that previus editions of this blog are listed on the right >>>> Also if you like what I write, please share my blog so it can get as well known as Digby's Hullabaloo blog. 😁

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There's a classic painting of Scrooge McDuck diving into a 90 foot deep pile of gold coins in his "money bin" by Carl Barks. In 2011 it sold for a then record $262,900. You can now buy a reproduction of it on Amazon for $16.

Trump is not a lovable billionaire, at least not to any rational persons not a MAGA hat wearing member of his cult. He's not remotely like Huey, Dewey, and Louie's Great Uncle Scrooge the richest man in the world. Nobody really knows how much money the Lord of Mar-a-Lago really has although he wants everyone to believe he is a world class billionaire his real wealth has always been a matter of speculation.

We do know that Trump is a show-off. In recent days we've been reminded how he had a fake front page of himself on the cover of Time Magazine displayed in various places where visitors could see it.

I'm reminded of the Scrooge painting every time I see this photo of the classified documents spread out on the floor at Mar-a-Lago. 

I am not a cartoonist. About all I can manage is a rudimentary photo manipulation like the one I made for yesterday's story so making the image I have in my mind would be a lot of work. So here's what I see in my mind. You can imagine it yourself. Picture Trump as Scrooge McDuck inside a giant vault-like room diving into a 90 foot deep pile of classified documents. Perhaps he'd have instead of Huey, Dewy, and Louie watching him he'd have autocratic leaders, the few celebrities willing to be anywhere near him (see 16 Celebrities Who Supported Trump In 2020 And What They Say About Him Now), and mere multi-millionaires watching him. A select few might be allowed to actually look at the documents.

There are numerous drawings of Scrooge enjoying his pile cash and coins:

Anybody who is a billionaire, even one worth a meager $1 - $3 billion as sources like Forbes have estimated him to be worth, not that he has that much actual cash at hand, could convert their assets into gold coins. (Or he could fake it with chocolate filed Hanukah gelt coins)

In his first iteration Scrooge was depicted like this in "Christmas on Bear Mountain" -- like the Dickens character he was named after, he was quite Trump-like.

Unlike Trump and like Ebenezer Scrooge he was redeemed. He went from being a miser to being merely thrifty, and became an adventurer and explorer. He ended up as a lovable Disney character and dotting great uncle to his nephews. He eventually was given his own comic book which had 456 editions until 2020.

Nobody except Trump for certain, and possibly people he showed the documents to or offered to sell them to knows exactly why he took the documents and fought to keep them. 

I speculated the more benign explanation for his taking the documents in this story which is like Scrooge wanting to be able dive into and show off his wealth .

The initial reason may not have been at all nefarious but Trump refusing to return the documents may have been more rooted in his psychopathology as described in this story;

But seriously...

‘This is crazy!’ Democratic lawmakers fear 'erratic and strange' Trump will blurt out top-secret intel in fit of rage  from RawStory

• “I would not leave it beyond him to do something as insane as that," said Rep. Ted Lieu (DCA). "When someone is cornered, they make very bad decisions, and Donald Trump is in a very bad situation right now. We don’t know what he will do."
• “You can’t just have this lying around at Mar-a-Lago -- this is crazy,” Lieu said. “Who knows who would have seen these documents in a public place like Mar-a-Lago? This is a resort where lots of people go.”
• “Did the MyPillow guy spend hours in the office taking notes? Did Rudy Giuliani? We don’t know," said Rep. Peter Welch (D-VT).
• “It’s hard to predict exactly what he’s going to do," Castro said. In the last few days, he’s been behaving very frantically. It’s very erratic and strange behavior — particularly from a former president.
• Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA) agreed Trump's social media posts presented an ongoing threat to national security. “Here’s what makes it truly scary: Trump is weirdly attached to all of this ‘Top Secret’ information, he constantly throws tantrums, and he has an insatiable desire for attention including on social media,” Huffman said. “Since he no longer has White House china to smash, his next tantrum might be blurting out sensitive national secrets on Truth Social, or calling his pal [Vladimir] Putin to divulge or even sell information. With anyone else these would seem like crazy scenarios, but not with Trump.”

Read previous editions from sidebar on right.

As a service, here are the video instructions for using a common Covid-19 test.

Watch His Waistline: Measuring Trump's stress level

The Trump Girdle Watch: How to Gauge the Preening Narcissist's Stress Level

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who's the sveltest of them all?

Reading the following article....

it occurred to me that the most read and recommended Daily Kos story out of over 1,400 which I posted there as a member of the liberal website's community of what they call diary writers was about Jennifer Senior calling Trump a preening narcissist in a NY Times OpEd. As far as I could tell she was the first person in the media to call him this.

Trump was captured in one paragraph and one catchphrase by NY Times OpEd writer Jennifer Senior

I also wrote this story:

The least dangerous aspect of Trump's psychopathology is his obsession with this appearance. However, knowing this about him may help us gauge how much he is feeling the stress of the legal jeopardy he may be in. Although another part of his personality is that he engages in a lot of psychological denial, almost to the point of clinical self-delusional thinking that he is untouchable, nobody can turn off their subconscious. 

People under stress often experience drastic changes in their eating habits. Readers may have experienced this in themselves or observed it with people close to them. At one extreme people may find their appetite diminished and may lose a lot of weight. At the other end people may experience the opposite and engage in overeating, often high calorie comfort foods, and gain a significant amount of weight.

If, as the RawStory article reports, Trump is eating to excess and gaining a lot of weight we may be able to ascertain this in several ways. 

One is simply that he stops allowing himself to be photographed. We know how much the media hog likes to have his image plastered all over the place. 

Another is that he doesn't even realize how much weight he's gained, maybe he just doesn't look in a full-length mirror or it he does so but is in such deep denial he doesn't see his "bigly" belly. (Apparently Trump never really used this word but it has often been attributed to him but really said big league, so we can say he has a big league belly.) If this happens and he tries to get his photo in the press everyone will see it and Twitter will go nuts with ridicule. 

The third possibility is that he'll wear a man's girdle (see Amazon). He may decide to wear one marketed as a sports item and tell himself it isn't really a girlie girdle. It's quite possible he's already donned one. There's already been speculation about this:

 

Trump Sparks Rumors He Wears A Girdle; Journalist Claims POTUS Has Bad Posture

and

Donald Trump’s posture is allegedly bad because he wears a girdle? ‘Obese’ POTUS reportedly very ‘vain’

If Trump has gained so much weight that if he appears in public it is readily visible you can expect a torrent of articles, snarky tweets, and cartoons.

While this will give his critics, me included, some perverse measure, it will also confirm that the stress of the beleaguered ex-president has increased, to use the term again, bigly. The more stress Trump is experiencing the more likely it is that he will make ill-considered, out outright self-defeating decisions. For example it's been widely reported that he seemed to have gone berserk with a storm of QAnon messages on his Truth Social website:

Trump promotes barrage of QAnon content via social media platform

As part of an online tantrum, Donald Trump didn't just promote QAnon content, he also pushed the line that Democratic leaders are Americans' "enemy."

and

With legal peril rising, Trump turns to QAnon and 4chan memes for support

The more off the rails of rational thinking Trump goes the less likely it is that he will heed whatever good legal advice he receives from his lawyers and the more chances there are that he will do or say things that jeopardize his legal defense. Not only this, but the more, dare I say, cray-cray he seems the more likely it is that some of his reasonably mentally healthy supporters will realize that he really belongs not necessarily in the big house for his crimes (where he does belong), but in the figurative nuthouse, not the White House.

Addendum:

This Slang dictionary uses Trump in their definition:

WHAT DOES BIGLY MEAN?

Bigly is a word popularly believed to have been made up and used by US President Donald Trump, meaning “to a large amount” or “with great intensity.” It is most often used in mockery of Donald Trump’s speech, mannerisms, and behavior.

Slang usage aside, it is a real word:

See Right Column for previous blog stories.