This continues the series, “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump Revisited: Mental Health Experts on the Devastating Mishandling of a Pandemic.” Whereas we could not have predicted a pandemic three-and-a-half years ago, the authors of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President anticipated how the president would respond, should there be a crisis. We tried to warn the public of the very consequences that are unfolding today: abuse of power, incompetence, loss of lives and livelihoods of many Americans, and increasing violence.
James Gilligan, M.D., is an adjunct professor of law at New York University. He is a renowned violence studies expert and author of the influential Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and Its Causes, as well as Preventing Violence and Why Some Politicians are More Dangerous than Others. He has served as director of mental health services for the Massachusetts prisons and prison mental hospital, president of the International Association for Forensic Psychotherapy, and as a consultant to President Clinton, Tony Blair, Kofi Annan, the World Court, the World Health Organization, and the World Economic Forum.
Lee: Your work with dangerous individuals and on violence prevention has guided us, since the 2017 conference at Yale, with the responsibility we have as professionals to alert and educate about danger, and that it was not about diagnosis, or mental illness. You often emphasize how mental illness does not make a person any more dangerous than the general population, that these are two separate issues. Could you expand on how to think about this? Continue reading.