Bandy Lee, a former faculty member in the Department of Psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine, was previously fired from Yale University for insulting former U.S. President Donald Trump and his supporters, according to the Yale Daily News. She is unhappy about this and therefore filed a lawsuit against Yale University on Monday (March 22).
In her lawsuit, Lee said Yale fired her for tweets she sent last January saying that “nearly all” of Trump’s supporters suffered from “common mental illness” and that Dershowitz, a lawyer on Trump’s legal team “He said Dershowitz, a lawyer on Trump’s legal team, was “completely infected with Trump’s symptoms.
Dershowitz then wrote a letter to Yale administrators saying Lee’s comments were “a serious violation of the ethical rules of the American Psychiatric Association” and asked that she be disciplined.
According to court documents, John Krystal, chair of Yale’s psychiatry department, sent an email warning Lee that the department would be forced to “terminate [her] teaching” if she continued to make similar public statements. But Lee continued to tweet about Trump’s mental state. So in May 2020, Lee was dismissed from Yale University.
However, in a letter to Lee, Director Kristal emphasized that the main reason for her dismissal was “her clinical judgment and professionalism” and “not because of the political content of her comments. The letter also said that Lee had repeatedly violated the American Psychiatric Association’s Goldwater Rule.
The Goldwater Rule states that it is unethical for a psychiatrist to comment on the mental state of a public figure in an official capacity without being licensed or medically cleared.
And Lee said in the recent lawsuit that she was not diagnosing Dershowitz, “but rather commenting on a widespread phenomenon of ‘shared mental illness’.”
Dershowitz told reporters that (Lee) blamed me for her dismissal, but I don’t have that much power. I was happy to bring the fact of her deviation from professional norms to Yale’s attention. “Facts are facts. Yale acted on the facts on the record, not on my opinion.”
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