The Moral Bankruptcy of the American Psychiatric Association
The Origin of Our Current Mental Health Pandemic
Bandy X. Lee
Feb 14
Published on SUBSTACK
CNN recently published an article, titled: “Trump’s Growing Volatility is Putting the World on Edge.”
The most volatile president in living memory is becoming ever more driven by the whiplash of his personal whims….
Just last week, Trump sparked outrage with the most racist messaging anyone can remember from a White House when a reposted cartoon video on his Truth Social account depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as apes….
Meanwhile, Trump’s fixation with his legacy and his manic efforts to plaster his name everywhere took another twist last week, when it was reported he wanted Dulles International Airport and New York City’s Penn Station renamed after him….
Greenland shows how wild rhetoric becomes policy…. chaos and unpredictability reminiscent of Trump’s leadership during the Covid-19 pandemic in his first term are mounting.
This was the case when Trump’s demands for Denmark to cede Greenland in January nearly broke NATO. It also manifests in Trump’s incessant tinkering with tariffs….
No one knows what Trump will do next. And perhaps he doesn’t either.
That is the very definition of mental instability. How did we ever get here, to be in the harrowing grips of a mentally-incapacitated “president”, as he destroys our country and endangers the world?
On February 10, 1967, the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution—designed in part to provide a mechanism for removing an incapacitated president, especially in a nuclear age—was ratified.
On January 9, 2018, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) made sure—while nuclear dangers have only escalated—that the Amendment would never be implemented.
What the drafters of the 25th Amendment did not anticipate was that a medical association could be so corrupt, it would not only refuse to give the medical data the Amendment required to proceed, but it would shut down every professional who attempted to offer them. All this was for institutional profit, in a scandalous sacrifice of the nation for self-interest and self-preservation. Yet, in an inversion of the truth for self-justification, it would explain away its cowardice and complicity as, “ethics”.
Under an administration that only rewarded scientific organizations for being antiscientific, the APA won first place. It was immediately showered with unprecedented federal funding, with which it was able to do what was never before possible in its history: to move out of Arlington, VA, and buy a brand new building on Capitol Hill, where it now rubs shoulders with Washington lobbyists. It was the first organization to capitulate—and to profit from doing the opposite of its raison d’être—and to set the pace for all the rest.
I predicted at the time that if a mental health problem were not dealt with on mental health terms—that is, through the 25th Amendment—all else would fail: impeachments, prosecutions, and even elections. This is what happened, because if there is no underlying mental capacity, no rational system can hold.
But how did this happen, and how did it all begin? It started with the distortion of an insignificant guideline called, “the Goldwater rule” (in truth, the APA’s own guild rule that no other mental health association shares—but, as the name itself suggests, was the product of a political compromise and thus prone to political abuse).
A surprisingly astute article traces its true origins:
In 1964, FACT magazine polled 12,356 psychiatrists on whether Goldwater was psychologically fit for the presidency. 1,189 said he was unfit.
And he was, in fact, unfit.
I would agree. Much is made of Barry Goldwater’s statesmanship in urging, along with other Republican leaders, Richard Nixon to resign during the Watergate scandal. However, I firmly believe he was able to become so because he was kept away from the presidency. What other candidate has sued a magazine for his defeat, and needs to be appeased with 75,000 dollars? Who has gotten a medical association to insert an “etiquette” in its ethical guidelines, for purely political—not scientific or clinical—reasons? It is not quite the level of seizing hundreds of ballot boxes for alleged “deficiencies or defects” in a vote count, but it is the same category.
The article highlights interesting facts:
… Goldwater sued FACT for defamation and won. The court … explicitly affirmed that a candidate’s mental fitness is “not only relevant but indeed crucial” for voters to evaluate. The ruling said: this work matters, and [the magazine owner] Ginzberg did it dishonestly. The obvious lesson was that qualified professionals should do it properly.
The APA drew the opposite conclusion. It adopted Section 7.3 in 1973, prohibiting all professional psychiatric commentary on public figures. To be clear the APA was not responding to a clinical ethics crisis. It was making a political move that contradicted what the court actually ruled.
The article further states:
The rule didn’t emerge from a principled debate about diagnostic methodology. It emerged because psychiatric evaluation of a right-wing extremist politician had democratic consequences that powerful people wanted to prevent….
Ginzburg … unilaterally escalated to “paranoia” and “mentally ill,” a clinical conclusion his own editor hadn’t reached and that no psychiatrist reviewed before publication….
The court found actual malice. Goldwater was awarded one dollar in compensatory damages, meaning he suffered essentially no provable harm, along with $75,000 in punitive damages.
And now here is what matters most, the part the APA buried.
The same court, in the same opinion, wrote:
His mental and physical health were proper targets for investigation and for adverse comment. We live in an age of powerful nuclear, chemical and biological weapons capable of massive destruction. These weapons are under the ultimate control of the President, and knowledge of the mental stability of the men who seek to be President is not only relevant but indeed crucial if the electorate is to choose intelligently….
It said Ginzburg’s work was fraud, not assessment. The obvious institutional response was: this must be done properly, by qualified professionals….
Justice Black’s dissent went even further. He wrote:
…the public has an unqualified right to have the character and fitness of anyone who aspires to the Presidency held up for the closest scrutiny [and that] extravagant, reckless statements and even claims which may not be true seem to me an inevitable and perhaps essential part of the process by which the voting public informs itself.
He predicted correctly the ruling would undermine necessary political debate by:
…making fearful and timid those who should under our Constitution feel totally free openly to criticize Presidential candidates.
This is what resulted, and whether or not the APA admits to it, it destroyed our democracy.
Announcement:
Dr. Bandy X. Lee is leading a public course series on major issues of our day, with Preventing Violence Now. The next class is this Saturday, February 14, 2026. More information and registration is here.
Dr. Lee is a forensic and social psychiatrist, president of the World Mental Health Coalition, and cofounder of Preventing Violence Now. She mainly worked with maximum-security prisoners and public-sector patients, before she became known to the public through her 2017 Yale conference and book that alerted against dangerous leadership. In 2019, she organized a major National Press Club Conference on the theme of, “The Dangerous State of the World and the Need for Fit Leadership.” In 2024, she followed up with another major Conference, “The More Dangerous State of the World and the Need for Fit Leadership.”
She published another book on dangerous leadership that has recently been expanded, in addition to a volume on how dangerous signs in a leader spreads and two critical statements on dangerous leadership. As many of the dangers she warned against unfolded—including millions of unnecessary pandemic deaths, the propagation of political violence, the exacerbation of economic inequality, the destruction of democracy, the devastation of the climate, the replacement of international collaboration with hostile confrontation, a renewed and accelerated nuclear arms race, a global emboldening of dictators leading to brutal warfare and genocide, and growing state-sanctioned cruelty and human rights violations—she has advocated for another way.
Now, the author of the internationally-acclaimed textbook, Violence; over 100 peer-reviewed articles and chapters; 17 scholarly books and journal special issues; and over 300 opinion editorials, introduces her curriculum on rising above the current destructive course to embrace an awareness of, “One World or None.”
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