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Time: Jun 15, 2026 07:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

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*Please join us for a conversation with Dr. Henry Abraham! He has been an indefatigable spokesperson f…

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Medical experts warn [it’s not Donald Trump’s] age that Americans should be most concerned about, but the conduct and behavior on display during his second presidency.

“It’s not that he’s 80, but let’s not ignore the red flags on the field,” Dr. Henry Abraham, a Nobel Prize-winning professor of Psychiatry Emeritus at Tufts University School of Medicine, told The Independent. “There are people in their 80’s and 90’s who have all their marbles.”

But Abraham, who stressed he … was not offering a diagnosis, is seriously alarmed that Trump has access to the nuclear codes.

“If you just look at everything that he’s said and done, and has been observed doing over, really, decades, certain signs and symptoms emerge which are warning flags…. Poor impulse control, poor control over his rage, sleeplessness at night, unrelenting aggression toward his perceived enemies,” Abraham said. “Well, put all that together and give him the nuclear football, and you can see why we’re worried.”

Dr. Abraham, a fellow alumnus of mine from Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, served as a consultant to the National Academy of Sciences, and as advisor for several revisions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association. He was an author of the constitution of Physicians for Social Responsibility and the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, which won the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize. He was one of the 36 signatories who stepped up to our request to be spokesperson for the Statement of Medical Concerns we submitted for the Congressional Record, urging the president’s removal from office for medical reasons. His many interviews include one with Anthony Davis of the Weekend Show, one for the Dean Obeidallah’s Show, and highlights by Ben Meiselas, who once featured me prominently with the launching of Meidas Touch.

White House denials continue, which accentuate our concern:

The White House did not acknowledge questions about the president’s health … but dismissed the concerns of medical experts in a statement.

“If it quacks like a duck, it may actually just be a Democrat hack doctor,” said White House spokesman Davis Ingle. “President Trump is the sharpest, most accessible, and energetic president in American history and any so-called medical professionals engaging in armchair diagnosis or false speculation for political purposes are clearly breaking the Hippocratic Oath they’ve sworn to”….

Except we are not all Democrats, and our warnings, superseding any political affiliation, have proven prescient. It should also be clear that our warnings over a decade concern mental pathology that has resulted in very real damage to our nation—so much so, that some believe that its 250th anniversary will be its obituary. There is certainly no U.S. president who has caused more unnecessary deaths—more than all war casualties in the nation’s history combined—through Covid mismanagement alone. Yet, he has laid the groundwork for causing multifold more deaths during the next pandemic, not to mention world war and a potential nuclear Holocaust. This has nothing to do with “armchair diagnosis”—or any diagnosis—and warning against danger signs is an obligation, not a violation, under the Hippocratic oath.

Donald Trump is said to have set a new bar for having been seen by 22 specialists, nearly doubling from his previous check-ups, but there is no sign of a psychiatrist on board. Yet, the rest of the world is evidently consulting psychologists.

Dr. Rosanne Leipzig, professor emerita, vice chair in the Department of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and one of the signatories to our Statement, said:

“The stuff that I most worry about here is the mental status exam.” [The geriatrician said] staying up late into the early morning hours on Truth Social is not the norm for an 80-year-old. “There are changes in sleep patterns as you get older. This is not one of them,” Leipzig said of the president’s social media habits. “People are not usually up all night and falling asleep during the day in important meetings”….

Abraham pointed out the bizarreness of repeatedly administering the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, a 10-minute screen for dementia, and continually announcing Donald Trump’s “30 out of 30” scores, as White House doctor, Capt. Sean Barbabella, has done.

“Who gets three or four [assessments] in 18 months?” Abraham said. “That’s clinically not indicated. We should follow it up with much more careful, exhaustive neuropsychological evaluations”…. Looking back at footage of Trump from 30 years ago, he was using sophisticated language and words with many syllables, Abraham noted. “None of that is present now,” he said.

“If you’re really concerned about cognition, you need a more in-depth set of tests,” Leipzig added. She said that when carrying out these tests, doctors will also learn about a patient through their appearance, behavior, eye contact, posture, their speech and mood. The geriatrician said that Barbabella’s note “didn’t really talk about” what Trump’s mood was like that day or “where he’s at.”

Given the obviously politically-motivated deviation from the medical standard of care, it is about time we instituted fitness standards for elected office such as the U.S. presidency, which has nothing to do with age:

Abraham … doesn’t agree with introducing an upper age limit on the presidency. Instead, he suggested an “honest, transparent assessment of physical and cognitive status before one even becomes president.”

Risk of illnesses such as dementia go up with age, but absent illnesses, there is no relation between fitness and age; conversely, a young person who has a disorder such as pathological narcissism may be unfit regardless of age, if he is too preoccupied with himself to consider the nation.

Abraham said he is most concerned with how the president, “[besides being] self-absorbed,… has a grandiose, omnipotent view of himself,” Abraham continued. “‘I can do anything I want,’ he said. Well, that includes starting a nuclear war.”

A glaring omission is the absence of any fitness standards for the most consequential office on the planet, when every other occupation in this country that deals with life-or-death matters requires a fitness test before taking that position. Given what difficulty we have in firing a president, who is an employee of the people, we need to have firm safeguards in place to avoid the catastrophe that results from having a president who pronounces:

“Peace for the world, OK? Peace for the world,” … the same day he threatened to “bomb the s***” out of Iran.

Announcement:

Dr. Bandy X. Lee is moving up her next “Emergency Psychiatric Meeting” to Monday, June 15, 2026, at 7 p.m. EDT / 4 p.m. PDT, in order to invite Dr. Henry Abraham. Please join us! Likewise, we are moving the next planning meeting for Survival University to the evening, on Friday, June 26, 2026, at 7 p.m. EDT / 4 p.m. PDT (because of several conflicts, we will try your requested midday time, beginning in July 2026). A paid subscription will automatically include you in both invitations, with a Zoom link to be sent to you an hour before the meetings. Thank you!

A fellow Yale alumnus wrote to me, after encountering during reunion week a fellow graduate in a prominent academic leadership position. He found the person to be “really frightening”—caring only about “$$$” and none of what the institution stood for. I responded:

It is great that you managed to go! At my twentieth, in 2014, I felt I accomplished everything and had everything. At my thirtieth, in 2024, I felt I lost everything and had nothing. Now, two years since, I feel the whole world is lost and the future grim.

At one of my earliest reunions, a much older generation left a quote: “Toto, Yale is not what it used to be!” Having just graduated, I did not know what that meant, but now I would say: “Toto, Yale is gone, as are all universities, and all institutions!”

I have seen the leadership changes that led to such a drastic decline. Just as vigilance is the price of liberty, our lack of vigilance in “leadership” has cost us everything. Yet, I concluded my letter:

I say this, not because there is no hope, but the contrary—because hope, peace, prosperity, and human flourishing are all so clearly within grasp!

We can choose to be vigilant again.

Political commentator Thom Hartmann outlines one example, below (he has appreciated the behavioral effects of structural violence, as I have emphasized structural factors as determinative of societal mental health):

There’s a singular cancer at the core of our democracy and it shows up in dozens of ways that don’t seem related to most Americans. It’s tearing our country apart, paralyzed our government, and has gutted our middle class.

That cancer is big and dark money in politics….

Its main cause in the present moment is one of the most corrupt Supreme Court decision in history, where 5 on-the-take Republicans on the Court ruled in 2010 that corporations are persons and money is the same thing as free speech. The wreckage of this decision is all around us.

Without Citizens United we’d have a national healthcare system like literally every other developed country in the world.

We don’t because the for-profit health insurance industry extracts hundreds of billions in profits from us every year and uses Citizens United’s legalization of bribery to pay off legislators to maintain the status quo….

Without Citizens United we’d have high-quality public schools in every community in America.

… All approved by politicians “incentivized” by “campaign contributions” to shovel more money into the coffers of a for-profit education industry that wants to take over all of America’s schools after first bankrupting them.

Without Citizens United we’d have free or affordable college nationwide.

We’re the only developed country in the world with … almost $2 trillion in student debt….

Without Citizens United we’d have universal suffrage, making it easy for everybody to vote.

The billionaires who control the GOP know that if everybody in America could easily vote like in every other developed democracy in the world their Republican toadies would lose control of both the federal government and many states, so they make it hard to vote….

Without Citizens United you’d have a decent, living wage….

Without Citizens United, we’d have serious federal climate legislation….

Without Citizens United, we’d have more aggressive gun regulation….

Without Citizens United, you’d pay less for virtually everything.

You get the picture. Whether Citizens United, or Project 2025, or similar, I am speaking of ways in which we have been cajoled into accepting a democracy in name only. An oligarchy or dictatorship in disguise is more “effective” than an overt one.

What no amount of manipulation or generation of mirages—e.g., through Donald Trump—can produce is real outcome. That depends on mental health. Anyone who has traveled will notice how tall, healthy, and prosperous people in the rest of the world have become over the decades. Even as America imperils their democracies as well, they have now lived in democracies long enough to enjoy universal healthcare, free education, social safety nets, and wide distributions of goods.

Personally, I used to consider Americans tall and the French or Koreans short for being “Latin” or “Asian”. Little did I know, twenty years later, that Latins and Asians would surpass Americans in height, while Americans would not only have shrunk and grown fat, but gone backward in gains of life expectancy. Mental health is crucial, since it drives what decisions we make (I used to say it would take universal healthcare for our society to be healthy enough to choose universal healthcare, and so we are stuck—and indeed we still are!).

The entire modern world attributes its peace and prosperity to us—we ourselves were once surprised to learn how true were President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s words:

We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics.

Once we decided to share—and share with the world through the Marshall Plan—the level of flourishing that unfolded was beyond expectation! Healthy conditions gave rise to better mental health, which in turn allowed for more life-affirming decisions, a firm meritocracy that served the public, and ample space for creativity and generativity.

We soared in national stature and moral authority throughout the world. Should it surprise us, then, that when we abandoned the New Deal and Great Society mentality to espouse one of greed, self-interest, “trickle-down economics,” and “Project for a New American Century,” that we would precipitously plummet in all areas—even as we hoard more wealth than any country on earth? The insatiable billionaires, soon to be trillionaires, who were allowed to dominate in this era are now busy buying up bunkers or planning to relocate to other planets after heaping their destruction; their mindset is not the source of any solution. We rather encounter the stark reality that no one will benefit, unless all benefit.

Knowing this, can we choose to change our mindset now? Do we have the courage to change our leadership to one that can share?

Announcement:

Dr. Bandy X. Lee is in the process of establishing Survival University (tentative name only). Those who wish to take part in this unprecedented effort should “reply” to this Newsletter, or a paid subscription will automatically include you in invitations. Our next planning meeting will take place on June 26, 2026, at 1 p.m. EDT / 10 a.m. PDT.

Dr. Bandy Lee opened by explaining this new public education initiative, although she emphasized that the final name remains undecided. She would like to avoid the baggage that the word “university” brings, while at the same time would like to have the project be as inviting, positive, and resonating while elevating as wide a public as possible. Many have made helpful name suggestions, which we are collecting.

The discussion focused on the initiative’s mission, which is to create a public engagement process that can help change our consciousness since, as Albert Einstein advised: “We will require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive.” It is therefore intended to go beyond the immediate urgencies to address the need for prevention through public mental health, democracy, healthy leadership, and societal healing.

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Dr. Bandy X. Lee is holding her first meeting on Survival University. If you have not yet had a chance to register, you are still invited to join:

Time: May 29, 2026 08:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

Join Zoom Meeting

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Passcode: 352169

*The pu…

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His social media posts are unhinged. He seems to fall asleep in meetings. He proudly proclaims he’s not thinking “even a little bit” about Americans’ personal finances in talks with Iran. And he lies constantly about the supposed success of the war with Iran he started for no good reason.

That’s just the start…. There’s the ruination of the Kennedy Center, the building of a ballroom (or bunker?) to replace the White House East Wing, and the wrecking ball that the Trump-aligned supreme court has taken to the voting rights of Black Americans. There’s the endless self-dealing and the abuse of the justice department’s intended purpose. And yet, the mainstream media doesn’t make much of any of that.

Nor does the Guardian. It could have mentioned—especially given the coverage by the British Medical Journal and the Independent—our Statement of Medical Concerns entered into the Congressional Record, but it implicitly accepts not mentioning us as, “priced in.” Even when it prominently covered former White House Chief of Staff General John Kelly’s use of our book as an “owner’s manual” for reining in a dangerous president during his first presidency, possibly saving the globe from nuclear war—covering that news story was already a lot, and it will not deviate so far from mainstream media as to connect the dots.

This is not to criticize the Guardian, which does much more than most, but to demonstrate the effects of a mental health pandemic, in spite of the best efforts of neutral or even Trump-opposing publications: they end up subtly supporting him. The New York Times may conduct a thousand investigative articles on Donald Trump’s crooked deeds, but none of them will make a dent as long as it assiduously avoids publishing a single article on the need for psychiatric expertise with respect to a global psychiatric crisis (rational communication will not penetrate where there is no mental capacity—and this issue needs to be addressed first, by experts). Even the illustrious authors I assembled, such as Robert Jay Lifton or Judith Herman, whom the Times used to feature regularly before they spoke out against Trump—vanished completely after they did. The periodical did not recognize that the public would suffer to the exact degree that we were “disappeared”.

In this vacuum, charlatans such as John Gartner appear. When, at my Yale conference, he as a member of the audience jumped up on stage, grabbed the podium, and spoke longer than any of the actual speakers, appalled senior faculty exclaimed: “He’s just like Trump!” That was only the beginning: he continued to coopt our movement until he destroyed it—becoming the very reason more than a dozen chairs of psychiatry withdrew their support at the time, why those who initially opposed “the Goldwater rule” came to advocate for it, and why I have turned down countless interview requests, because I did not wish to be paired with him. He continues to throw “red meat” at a deprived public—anything that will provoke or sensationalize—to the masses he partly caused to be famished, when he placed himself before the cause (we see from Donald Trump that it is impossible for a malignant narcissist to support any cause other than himself, and in the process sabotages every other cause):

The claim of frontotemporal dementia in particular has stuck…. Diagnosing someone with this condition from afar is not only irresponsible—it’s impossible.

He is too reckless even to recognize that he does not have the medical training to diagnose (all psychiatric and neurological diagnoses need medical clearance), let alone know when it is not even possible to diagnose. He relentlessly plagiarizes from everyone to appear intelligent, throwing in big words to sound like he knows something—as he monitors my Substack to modulate his façade—but a true expert can see through his ignorance. He is again riding on the wave of our Statement to the U.S. Senate, never clarifying that he was never invited—indeed, explicitly banned—from being one of the signatories.

Insanity is often defined as: “The state of doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.” I have a personal definition of mental health: “The ability not to get in the way of one’s natural growth, healing, and thriving.” Sanity is as simple as that: not getting in one’s own way, whatever the reason one gives for it, and a whole society can equally decide to embrace health.

Fortunately, more of the press is catching onto the damage Gartner has done, by relentlessly placing himself before all the eminent experts, continuing to cite his Johns Hopkins affiliation while concealing that he was forced out (just as Jeffrey Lieberman was finally forced out, not because of academic censorship but because of their malignant personalities), and exploiting the public’s lack of mental health knowledge.

Huffington Post is now discerning responsibly citing danger as a reason for mandatory examination:

Americans hoping that President Donald Trump’s third “annual” physical exam over a span of 13 months on Tuesday might offer insights into his increasingly bizarre and incomprehensible statements and social media posts are likely to be disappointed….

Bandy Lee, a psychiatrist and former professor at Yale School of Medicine, said [Walter Reed military] doctors do, though, have an ethical responsibility to the American people…. “Of course, the White House physician has a duty, and so do we. The public is being shortchanged, and endangered, to the maximum,” said Lee….

“The incoherence is worrisome, possibly dangerous,” said Allen Dyer, a retired psychiatrist and retired George Washington University professor who recommends a full battery of tests…. Dyer, in 1973, helped craft the so-called “Goldwater rule” that he says has been misinterpreted to mean that mental health professionals should never offer their analyses of political figures.

Indeed, Dyer repeatedly emphasized to me that “the Goldwater rule” was intended to be an affirmative obligation to educate society regarding mental health issues that may surround a public figure, without diagnosing—which, as stated above, is impossible, as tempting as it may be to do so. The article cites how twenty mental health experts wrote to the White House physician, calling on him to act on the dangers and to respond to: “the explicit concerns on the part of 36 renowned medical experts and mental health professionals, now entered into the Congressional Record.” What is different this time is that this latter group includes recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize, for contributing to reducing nuclear dangers, and former chairs who have held some of the highest leadership positions in the field.

As I have stated multiple times—if not the American Psychiatric Association’s silencing us, to which Gartner gave ammunition—I firmly believe Donald Trump would have been removed early in his first term. Congress members themselves told us so, as did the revered journalist Bill Moyers. The world would have hailed our nation for a difficult but rational response to a psychiatric crisis—instead of our becoming the laughingstock of the world, a cautionary tale of how democracy can collapse overnight, and the worst and most dangerous “Banana Republic” in human history—before his pathological hold on his “MAGA” base was complete.

However, there is some good coverage from the fringe press. And an unexpected, sensible response came from a pulmonologist:

NBC News medical analyst Dr. Vin Gupta says there are issues with Trump that just aren’t adding up…. While Gupta was unsure if Trump was showing signs of multi-organ dysfunction, he admitted to having “serious concerns about his executive functioning.”

“We are having some real issues here with impulse control because … any reasonable person would say that if you have to threaten genocide you’re not in a strong negotiating position, or you have to revise your negotiating tactics, that isn’t a normal way to negotiate,” said Gupta, questioning if Trump had the executive functioning “to organize his thoughts to make considered rational decisions under stress.”

He is responding the way I had wished former Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci had. If Fauci had simply said: “It is my responsibility, as a trained physician, to point out when consultation with another medical specialty—psychiatry—is warranted.” He saved lives, but he could have saved hundreds of thousands, if not a million, more, had he addressed the principal obstacle to proper governance. Now, we have another chance.

Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung said: “What we do not make conscious emerges later as fate.” We have the choice now to stop resigning ourselves to self-imposed, “fate”. Entertaining ourselves with whether Donald Trump has “frontotemporal dementia” or “psychosis” is a distraction and, until now, an obstacle. What we need to do is to recognize that, at this stage, what we can and should evaluate is dangerousness—this is why I titled my book as I have—unfitness to be in office for another day, the need for removal from access to weapons and the military, and a mandatory evaluation, whether or not the dangerous individual consents to it. This is the unequivocal medical standard of care, of which the public needs to be aware.

Announcement:

Dr. Bandy X. Lee is in the process of establishing SURVIVAL UNIVERSITY. Please use the contact form to join and to help in this effort. Our first planning meeting is tonight, May 29, 2026, at 8 p.m. EDT / 5 p.m. PDT.

President Donald Trump[‘s behavior] has led many to question Trump’s sanity and to offer the President some labels in turn, including “unhinged,” “lunatic,” and “clearly insane”…. These traits have long been chronicled, including in Tim O’Brien’s bold prophetic Trump Nation: The Art of Being the Donald; Maggie Haberman’s The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America; and David K. [sic] Johnston’s The Making of Donald Trump. And nearly a decade ago, the book edited by psychiatrist Bandy Lee entitled The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, produced 27 mental health experts who questioned Trump’s fitness for high office.

Making no distinction between mental health expertise and a layperson’s analysis about a president’s mental health is the first sign that something is not quite right—especially coming from a Yale professor! Usually, an expert in one field recognizes the importance of expertise in all fields—especially a field as scientifically-grounded as medicine, but not here. The bizarre phenomenon of even experts claiming that mental health needs no expertise—that they themselves are mental-health-expert equivalents, even as they ignore a mental health pandemic that is devouring much of the nation. What is happening here?

Of course, the 27 mental health experts I “produced” were only the most renowned psychiatrists—some considered, “legends of our time,” and now Nobel laureates—who represent the many thousands who joined us through the World Mental Health Coalition, without a single mental health professional diverging from our medical consensus at that time.

These oddities reflect what I have been calling, “Trump Contagion”—in the worst cases, “shared psychosis”—which by definition induces previously healthy persons into believing and acting as if they had the same mental disorder as the primary afflicted person. Since it is a contagion, even self-proclaimed, “long-standing critics” are not immune. This is why I have, since The Dangerous Case, dubbed Trump a public health problem and focused on his dangerousness, especially his access to military and nuclear powers (dangerousness is a distinct assessment mental health experts make, and we have the sole authority to intervene on assessments of “dangerousness” alone—unlike prisons and police, which cannot act until actual dangers happen).

The public health problem has now become a national existential crisis.

In pretending that he knows better than the mental health experts, the author of the article not only echoes Donald Trump himself, but illustrates the very reason why America is unable to extricate itself from the greatest psychiatric danger the nation has faced in its history. I quote much of the article verbatim, so that those who still have awareness can see what is happening to the minds of even the best-educated Americans:

as someone who has known him for over 30 years, I assert that he is no “crazier” than he ever was. Trump’s penchant for exaggeration, self-promotion, and misrepresentation is hardly new….

(One may have thought that he detected signs of a disordered psychological structure from the start, and the extreme dangers this implies, as mental health experts would, but he actually comes to the opposite conclusion.)

Trump seemed almost comically delusional to me in the mid-1990’s…. At the time, I thought Trump’s grandiose visions for Mar-a-Lago were unrealistically fanciful. Surely this scheme would go the way of his failed casinos, airlines, and other imploded ventures. I was wrong.

Thus, I learned to take Trump’s antics seriously. This is why, in 2004, I warned that Donald Trump had tapped into an underappreciated part of the American national character that would drive him to run for president…. Episode after episode, I was alarmed by how Trump treated women. And I also challenged the premise that a leader’s success should be anchored on a contestant’s ability to get their own team members “fired”. However, my warnings fell on deaf ears.

(A responsible mental health expert would know that pathology can go either way, depending on intervention. The author boasts about warning in the past, but his current conclusion that Donald Trump is fine and well because he is successful now contributes to deaf ears!)

In 2005, I brought Trump to a Yale CEO Summit, which I founded and lead. A dozen of the biggest business leaders warned me that if Trump arrived, they’d walk out in disgust. Trump arrived, and they walked out…. they are no longer walking out on Trump.

(Now he is one of those no longer walking out on Donald Trump. Does he consider that his taking Trump to places like the Yale CEO Summit may have contributed to his success—that containing a spread of mental pathology depends on our maintaining robust mental stability and clear boundaries, ourselves?)

I believe Trump to be a mercurial, vain, self-promoting purveyor of glitz. He has made his name beyond a checkered New York real estate career marked by multiple bankruptcies by bringing a certain view of class to the masses, with a simple but brutalizing recipe for success that seemed accessible to all…. For instance, time and time again, he deliberately taps into populist anger….

As I document in my book,… Trump always relies on the same unorthodox disruptive tactics. His greed, grandiosity, divisiveness, and shifting agenda methods are not new.

(Not only are they not new, they are rigid, as signs of serious mental symptoms; concluding that success precludes mental disease betrays an ignorance of conditions such as psychopathy—the most debilitating disorder known to psychiatry, which wreaks more havoc than all other illnesses combined, but manipulates others into seeing one as the most competent, most charming, and most ideal for any position, even as the lack of conscience makes the afflicted person capable of tremendous evil.)

To be sure, we all suffer whiplash when President Trump pivots from conjuring imminent national security threats,… despite the lack of evidence of any immediate danger. This is not insanity. It is Trump’s deliberate ability to change the public dialogue from his losing hand on domestic topics, which he does not want to discuss…. This is not because he has gone mad. It is because it keeps working for him.

And when Trump threatens to destroy thousands of years of Persian civilization, so that the other party believes whatever the negotiated solution is a far better resolution than where things were headed, this is not a sign of poor mental health….

I ultimately believe that while Trump’s dangerous lifelong “megalomania” may not endear him to many, it does not indicate insanity either. Instead, it indicates a clear pattern.

“Insanity” is a legal term, but the “clear pattern” is that of mental pathology. And to identify patterns of pathology—or “evidence of any immediate danger” for psychiatric reasons—is a mental health expert’s task, not a layperson’s. This is how everything got normalized and sanitized, for those who are untrained and interpret what they see in terms of what they know—and certainly he has not seen dozens of mentally-disordered persons daily, as would a mental health professionals. And while the average person may wait for things to get “bad enough” for others to react, an expert may advise that “the ability to see” is what tends to go first as things get really bad.

Experts generally delineate what their area of expertise is, what they can and cannot speak about, before embarking on conclusions. We would not expect a plumber to perform heart surgery, or an astrologer to contain an Ebola epidemic. Yet, that is what this dangerously irresponsible article tries to do, and “bizarre” is not my word but that of a Nobel laureate co-signatory of our Statement:

A truly bizarre piece that mainly makes the case that [the president] has had major mental problems for decades and then uses that fact to conflate the assertion that he has not gotten worse (which he clearly has) with the conclusion that he’s not insane after all—just the same old (crazy) Donald.

I have had to explain Trump Contagion again in my recent interviews. Mental health expertise concerns itself with frame before content. We assess the emotional and cognitive capacity to accept reality. We address a person’s reliability, projections, deflections, and even threats and intimidation of others to accept one’s untruth—and understand that a person can kill for this, even give a million dollars to each of the thousands who would kill on his behalf. We also deal with denial that reaches dangerous—even existential—proportions, because of the powers one has at one’s disposal.

Assessing that a president meets the threshold of dangerousness that requires immediate removal for medical reasons is only the first step. That society avoids us, suppresses us, and even publishes nonsense than listen to mental health experts—because it has internalized Trump’s need to deny reality—is itself an effect of Trump Contagion, or shared psychosis. The leaps in logic and extreme cognitive dissonance, just to claim there is nothing mentally wrong here, should be apparent to anyone not yet swept up in the contagion.

This does not change the reality that psychiatric expertise is more critically-needed than ever. To quote Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung:

It is not famine, not earthquakes, not microbes, not cancer, but man himself that is man’s greatest danger to man, for the simple reason that there is no adequate protection against psychic epidemics.

And this time, it will not just end with ingesting Ivermectin or disinfectant—but with drinking the Kool-Aid whole.

Announcement:

Dr. Bandy X. Lee is in the process of establishing SURVIVAL UNIVERSITY. Please use the contact form to join and to help make this unprecedented effort successful. She is also leading a public course series with Preventing Violence Now, about which you can find out more and register here.

The biggest story in the country, today and always, is that the president of the United States is mentally unwell.

However, there is no mention of our efforts in her or any other American media. We must go to the foreign press for that, such as the Independent:

A growing chorus of medical and legal professionals … has made their thoughts abundantly clear. In late April, a group of 36 leading U.S. doctors with expertise in mental health had seen enough. Together, they issued a statement calling for Trump’s immediate removal from office for medical reasons.

In it, they said: “... we are compelled to warn of a President of the United States who is increasingly a danger to the public. We do not take our statement, and the responsibility that comes with making it, lightly.” That statement, which includes signatures from two Nobel Prize recipients, was then entered into the official Congressional Record—the archive of American legislative history.

Among those sounding the alarm was Dr. Bandy X. Lee, a forensic psychiatrist and violence expert who first spoke out about Trump’s mental health soon after his first election in 2016. Lee told The Independent: “I believe it is no longer difficult for even the layperson to see that he is in need of immediate, even hospital-level, care.”

Then, on 11 May, the constitutional lawyer Bruce Fein wrote an open letter to Congress together with lawyer and former presidential candidate Ralph Nader, urging it to enact legislation under the 25th Amendment, which clarifies the transfer of power if a president is incapacitated.

“Every day Mr. Trump remains in office is a roll of the dice with the survival of the species,” Fein and Nader wrote. “President Trump might employ nuclear weapons against Iran in a fit of rage … which would not be ignored by China, Russia and Pakistan. Vice President J.D. Vance and principal officers of the executive departments have displayed spinelessness in response to Mr. Trump’s dictator-like rants, disqualifying them from fairly appraising his ability to discharge the powers and duties of the White House”….

An accompanying statement concluded that the most worrisome examples were his outbursts of what was termed “extreme, seemingly uncontrollable rage,” such as his multiple threats to destroy Iran. Lee told The Independent that Trump’s grandiose, wishful fantasies and images “are signs of a psychotic spiral…. A desperate attempt to counteract the total helplessness one feels when one is losing one’s mind”….

Since the statement was released, she noted in her Substack that Trump has “exhibited even more signs of grandiosity, e.g., posting images of himself on social media shaking hands with God, acting like Jesus and dressing as a pope. And he has continued nocturnal bingeing on social media posts that are filled with accusations of multiple conspiracies against him, as often as 150 times a night.”

While she maintains she is not diagnosing Trump as she would a patient, Lee says she has a positive obligation to improve society and better public health, which includes acting “if anyone is a danger to society—in fact, danger for psychiatric reasons is a mandated duty for which we could be held legally liable for not responding.”

From a psychiatric standpoint, what does a pattern of sleeping four hours or fewer do to executive function, impulse control and the ability to make life-or-death decisions? Lee says that whether caused by anxiety, depression, mania, stress or substances, lack of sleep will worsen any diminished capacity in a person, including executive function, impulse control and critical decision-making.

“We know that he appears to fall asleep during important functions…. So, the fateful, life-or-death decisions that are handed to him, or that he takes upon himself despite not being equipped to handle them, imperil our nation and all the globe”….

In December, Trump insisted he was “sharper than I was 25 years ago”—before, roughly 15 minutes later, appearing to struggle to keep his eyes open as his Commerce Secretary spoke. Lee says that it’s a rule in psychiatry that the more serious the impairment, the greater the denial that anything is wrong. “In fact,” she says, “lack of insight is one of the symptoms of grave psychiatric illness,… and the damage is even greater when one cannot tolerate the thought of any defect or failure”….

As America enters its third month of being in an unsanctioned war with Iran, which has sparked market shocks across the world, many believe the president’s inability to understand what he has unleashed, combined with an incoherence in his messaging, is leading to increasing alarm among those inside the White House, too….

Lee says that, whatever the cause, she believes that Trump poses a grave danger to the nation and to the world for psychiatric reasons. “This is the only criterion we need to implement immediate treatment, including involuntary stabilisation, during which tests can be done to distinguish whether he has dementia, a substance problem, a major mental illness, a dangerous personality disorder, or any combination of these that would produce his presentation.

“Now, with Bruce Fein, we will be urging Congress to appoint itself the ‘other body’ that the 25th Amendment allows and to hold hearings with experts immediately.”

Sometimes, pundits bring us up, although that is usually where the program ends without a response:

Ty Cobb: I don’t know how anyone can see what he posts or watch him in any meeting and think that he is fit for office…. I think he is seriously ill. I think Trump needs medical attention, and there needs to be an intervention.

Ari Melber: That is some of the response in Congress, where we see this is a mainstream issue…. Ty, your view.

Ty Cobb: So, it is not just my view. In 2017, Bandy Lee, a well-respected psychological professional trained at Harvard and Yale and highly regarded at the National Institute of Mental Health and 26 of her colleagues and other respected psychiatrists around the world posted a lengthy journal article commenting on Trump’s [symptoms, which] have only gotten worse. They are remarkable at this stage of the game…. And because he has no impulse control left,… he practices only vengeance and greed now,… looting the government for his benefit.

Announcement:

Dr. Bandy X. Lee is in the process of establishing SURVIVAL UNIVERSITY. Please use the contact form to join and to help make this unprecedented effort successful. She is also leading a public course series with Preventing Violence Now, about which you can find out more and register here.

Dr. Bandy X. Lee is inviting you to a live session:

Time: May 15, 2026 08:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

Join Zoom Meeting

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/85472653209?pwd=pMzXxaAm7nNgRbrTySgJCctarJ3W5u.1

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Passcode: 146120

*Please join us for a critical psychiatric meeting today, May 15, 2026, at 8 p.m. EDT / 5 p.m. PDT. We …

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Here is an excerpt from Dr. Henry Abraham’s interview, entitled, “36 Mental Health Professionals Call for Trump’s Immediate, Lawful Removal from Office”:

Dr. Henry Abraham talks about a group of 36 leading physicians and other doctors with expertise in mental health, who he’s acting as a spokesperson for, “who issued a statement calling for President Donald J. Trump’s immediate, lawful removal from office for medical reasons. His mental instability, coupled with his sole, unchecked authority to launch nuclear weapons, makes him a clear and present danger to the safety of all Americans.”

Dr. Abraham is co-recipient of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize for his role as the co-author of the Constitution of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and author of After the Genocides: Immigration, Education and the Prevention of Nuclear War.

SCOTT HARRIS: So we’ve invited you here to talk about your role as spokesperson for the statement signed by 36 medical experts who declare that President Trump is too unstable to remain in office…. I wonder as we begin, if you would just tell us about the long journey of psychiatrists and psychologists who’ve been focused on the concern regarding Donald Trump’s mental health going back to the 2016 elections and the book. And we’ve talked about the book with Dr. Bandy Lee several times, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump….

DR. HENRY ABRAHAM: Well, it’s a pretty big question. Certainly, Dr. Lee has been a pioneer in this problem area…. It took me 10 years to figure that out…. I feel absolutely certain that he has exhibited a large number of psychiatric and some soft and neurological symptoms over time that have gotten worse and I’m afraid more dangerous….

Not only is [he] unpredictable and erratic, but this is a guy who only has control of nuclear weaponry. He can launch a nuclear attack if in the middle of the night.

These are the days when America will decide: does the office of the president exist to serve the people, or do the people exist to prop up an incapacitated president—even if it means sacrifice of the country?

Medical experts came forward, because our nation is in a medical—a psychiatric—crisis, more than anything else. Our system’s refusal to deal with a mental health issue for what it is, but attempting to explain it away through politicization, normalization, and any rationalization other than the truth has reached its culmination, where we either face the issue or go down with the Titanic.

And as in any system where pathocracy reigns, a proper response seems to be left to the people. Indeed, the most intelligent, thoughtful, and resourceful actions appear to be coming not from those holding power but from members of the public. Here is another example:

Dr. Lee,

Thank you for your work…. I really appreciate the hard work you and your colleagues have put into making America safe.

While I’m not a physician or psychologist, I worked in the FDA as a Public Health Officer and have a post-graduate doctorate in clinical pharmacy with residency and experience in psycho-pharmacy. I subsequently conducted clinical trials and implemented programs for global drug approval in the pharmaceutical industry.

This past January I wrote a Dear Doctor letter to each of the physicians in the House of Representatives and Senate as a non-partisan asking them what they would do if they had a patient or family member exhibiting the behavior of the President. I included my U.S. Senators, _______ and _______, and Representative, _______, with courtesy copies. I unfortunately received not one response. It was disappointing to say the least.

If you would like [to] discuss how I might have been more effective, I welcome the opportunity.

Best wishes and keep up the good work!

Tonight, we will discuss what is happening with our Statement of Medical Concerns, what responses we have received from the media and Congress, what we can do to counteract “Trump Contagion” or “shared psychosis,” and what our critical role might be as citizens in this moment of national psychiatric emergency.

Here is an excerpt of an interview by Dr. Abraham, entitled, “Growing Medical Concern about the President of the United States”:

IAN MASTERS: It’s pretty clear that Donald Trump is losing his both physical and mental health…. But now it seems that because he’s lived in a world of magical thinking, in his own world, reality is now biting him in the form of the misbegotten war he’s got us and the world into in the Persian Gulf, and he seems to be lashing out…. your colleague, Dr. Bandy Lee … said the worst thing you can do is give power to a sociopath…. So is there any way in terms of a psychiatric intervention? In other words, is he too far gone? Not that anybody around him is likely to pull him over because he’s surrounded by sycophants.

DR. HENRY ABRAHAM: Yeah, it is a problem, isn’t it?... There are a handful of ways that can be done. None of them are easy and maybe none of them are possible. But even if there’s a 10 percent chance, that’s what you take because the downside of not taking that chance can be absolutely disastrous.

The medical dangers and impairment [are] real. And I’m certainly willing to, as we used to say in the civil rights movement, lie down on the tracks singing for that one. That’s an absolutely critical thing for physicians to get up and attest to. And that’s what my colleagues and I have been doing.

Yet, medical experts speaking up is only the first step. There needs to be public conversation, and so far, there has been coverage by the BMJ, the Independent, AlterNet, Raw Story, Daily Beast, Yahoo News, MSN, MindSite News, the Oregonian, BTL, Background Briefing, Hoodline, and IOL—but none of the legacy media. In a functioning democracy, the citizenry has fair access to journalism as well as expertise—and it needs to know that medical experts are at its service.

Announcement:

*Please join us for a CRITICAL PSYCHIATRIC MEETING on Friday, May15, 2026, at 8 p.m. EDT / 5 p.m. PDT. In a functioning democracy, the citizenry has fair access to journalism as well as expertise! We will discuss what is happening with our Statement of Medical Concerns, where the media and Congress are, and the people’s critical role in this moment of national psychiatric emergency. The link will also be sent to paid subscribers an hour before the meeting (apologies for making it paid, but it is in part for attendees’ protection, given past hackings).

Dr. Bandy X. Lee is inviting you to a live session:

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Here is what they have written:

OPEN LETTER TO CONGRESS

We strongly urge legislation pursuant to section 4 of the 25th Amendment to depute Congress in lieu of the Vice President and principal officers of the executive departments with the power to determine whether the President is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” As regards President Donald Trump, the attached letter printed in the Congressional Record from renowned medical professionals across the political spectrum makes a convincing case for finding President Trump mentally unfit and dangerous to mankind. Since the letter was written, President Trump has threatened to destroy 6000 years of Iranian civilization, which includes Cyrus the Great’s release of Jews from Babylonian Captivity and Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat. Mr. Trump’s deranged raving on April 7 speaks for itself: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”

Every day Mr. Trump remains in office is a roll of the dice with the survival of the species. President Trump might employ nuclear weapons against Iran in a fit of rage, which surely would be answered by China, Russia, and Pakistan. Vice President J.D. Vance and principal officers of the executive departments have displayed a spinelessness in response to Mr. Trump’s Hitler-like rants disqualifying them fairly appraising his ability to discharge the powers and duties of the White House. Congress must thus step into the breach by appropriate legislation. In exercising its judgment under the 25th Amendment, Congress would be expected to take testimony under oath of experts in the fields of physical or mental health.

We summon you to display the courage of the 56 signatories to the Declaration of Independence who signed their death warrants to secure unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness fortified by government by the consent of the governed.

Sincerely,

Bruce Fein

Ralph Nader

I understand from attending the workshops at Fordham Law School, on invitation by the 25th Amendment’s principal drafter, John Feerick, that the Amendment is not as prohibitive as the public has been misled to believe. The “other body,” for example, is intended to replace the Cabinet precisely at times like ours, when the principal officers of the executive departments cannot be entrusted to call out a president who is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Congress has the authority to appoint a body suited to the occasion, and Rep. Jamie Raskin has proposed a bill to form one that includes psychiatrists and other physicians.

However, according to Fein, there is an even more expedient path: Congress can appoint itself and immediately begin holding hearings! Psychiatrists and physicians do not have to be appointed to a body to give their input. In fact, we could right away testify to our Statement of Medical Concerns, now in the Congressional Record.

The vice president does not have to lead the charge but merely consents to acting as president pro tempore. The Fordham group also discussed provisions for when the president and vice president are both unable, for which the full order of succession has been clarified. Unfortunately, there may be a long line of succession to go through before we reach a leader who meets the minimal mental health criteria for fitness for duty—but this is the fault of ignoring the issue for so long, pretending that mental health issues were mere political disagreement, not a fault of the Amendment itself. An unfit leader was given inordinate time—either because of corruption, complicity, or simple denial—to appoint a whole coterie of unfit individuals to surround him, such that entire institutions have become incapacitated from the spread of his mental incompetence.

There is now a great distance between where we are in mental health awareness and where we need to be to tackle the crisis. There has been growing media coverage, but I wish to highlight here especially a citizen’s call:

Hi Dr. Lee,

I’m writing to thank you for your decade or more of work seeking to help citizens be protected from known dangers and harms of persons such as the 45th and 47th president of the U.S. I recently learned that you were included in the [Statement of Medical Concerns] entered in the Congressional Record on 4/30/26….

I’m now inquiring to ask if that recorded letter may suggest that you and/or your group of fellow Public Health experts were called into any form of Congressional Hearing, be it a shadow hearing, or investigative hearing or other? I would find such a hearing to be an even greater cause of hope [that] could help swing the U.S. citizenry’s growing dissatisfaction with Trump….

I could foresee that if only the 7 million remote persons who were measured to have participated in 1 or more of the 3 recent past No Kings Day events, were to submit direct messages, letter, emails, web posts to the Vice President, urging him to fulfill his duties of responsibility to protect citizens from known dangers…. this could bring to Mr. Vance’s mind the necessary urgency, and serious consideration necessary to recognize the negative alternatives, if he would knowingly NOT intervene,… while there exists the record of qualified psychiatrists, including yourself, as well as millions of citizens urge his TIMELY action….

If you are free to inform the public about an existing Congressional Hearing, or hearing granted by the Senate or the Federal Election Commission, toward establishing the requirement for all candidates for federal office, but especially for office of president, to submit to “fitness” pre-screening, prior to obtaining eligibility to have one’s name listed on any ballot for such federal office. This, too seems to be serious and nonpartisan issue directly linked to Public Safety and mental health…. our U.S. Congress must be made to admit their negligence and failure, and the logical implications of their complicity with the crimes and harms and deaths that Donald Trump has fomented and escalated, up to point of an illegal war by pirating the authority of the Executive Office of president.

Thank you.

Announcement:

Please join a CRITICAL PSYCHIATRIC MEETING this Friday, May15, 2026, at 8 p.m. EDT / 5 p.m. PDT.

Please encourage your family, friends, and colleagues to join!

The link for the Critical Psychiatric Meeting will be sent to paid subscribers at 7 p.m. EDT / 4 p.m. PDT on the day of the meeting.

We will discuss what is happening with our Statement of Medical Concerns, where the media and Congress are, and an enlightened citizenry’s critical role in this moment of national psychiatric emergency. The link will be sent to paid subscribers an hour before the meeting (apologies for making it paid, but it is in part for attendees’ protection).