B X Lee -- ‘Trump Needs “Hospital-Level Care” as Midterms Test “Fragile Mental State”’
‘Trump Needs “Hospital-Level Care” as Midterms Test “Fragile Mental State”’
Project for Human Survival Meeting Today at 11 a.m. EDT / 8 a.m. PDT
*A link is below, and will be sent an hour before the meeting to paid subscribers.
Today at 11 a.m. EDT, at our “Project for Human Survival” meeting (joined with our “Presidential Psychiatric Emergency” meetings, since imminent and long-term emergencies have merged), Benjamin Casteillo will join us. Casteillo is a former corporate executive who turned independent researcher, educator, and founder of New World Together. Since 2017, he has explored the systemic, psychological, and cultural roots of what he calls our “metacrisis”, through a transdisciplinary approach. He focuses on how unconscious survival patterns, collective trauma, and social structures are the core of today’s global crises—and how greater awakening and expansion of our consciousness is key to our much-needed transformation.
I have stated publicly since early 2017 that Donald Trump is dangerous for mental health reasons. I have stated since early 2018 that he requires an inpatient admission to be evaluated. If the course is inevitable that hospitalization will result, then the earlier the intervention the better. These are purely medical judgments, and if one is confident to be able to argue one’s clinical assessment in court if challenged, then a physician or mental health professional is given the authority to act.
I had been known for my clinical judgment, even when I was a faculty member of Yale School of Medicine. Teaching at Yale Law School for 17 years, I also understood the legal aspects. I felt it a moral imperative to educate the public, since all these concepts are likely to be unfamiliar. Until the public is fully familiar, we cannot act.
Why? Because the public will not be able to distinguish between a coup and the medical standard of care—unless they are educated. The public will not know the difference between political framing and true mental unfitness—unless they have knowledge. If the public is not educated, Soviet-style psychiatry would be all too easy to implement as a political weapon, and like Germany under Nazism, the people would confuse projection with actual affliction (consider which side is ill in, “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” or whom Donald Trump is really referring to when he mocks others’ disabilities or defects).
During a Tuesday press gaggle, Trump repeatedly snapped at [a] White House correspondent,… labeling him a “sick person.”
“Wait, wait, wait, wait. Quiet, quiet!” Trump said while seated behind the Resolute Desk. “What’s wrong with you? Are you a sick person? I actually think there’s something wrong with you”….
Last month, Dr. Bandy Lee, a forensic and social psychiatrist who previously taught at Harvard and Yale, described Trump as “an incredibly mentally unstable individual who’s become far more unstable with time.”
What we are able to implement in a political setting depends on the public’s level of understanding. This is why I continue to excoriate the American Psychiatric Association (APA) which, blinded by the prospects of financial and political gain, suppressed mental health experts’ education of the public. It did so against science (the new science does not require a personal examination for assessing dangerousness) and against ethics (the Declaration of Geneva, instituted after the Nuremberg trials, requires physicians to speak up against dangerous regimes and is far more important than one guild’s “Goldwater rule”).
Raw Story covered my interviews this way:
Forensic psychiatrist Bandy Lee said Sunday that the judge in Donald Trump’s New York criminal case should have ordered a “hospital-level evaluation” of him before sentencing. She also said Trump still needs “hospital-level care.”
Lee, a longtime Trump critic, spoke in an interview with MeidasTouch host Anthony Davis on “The Weekend Show.”
Lee said a panel of psychiatrists gave Justice Juan Merchan a “dangerousness risk assessment” before sentencing. Merchan, of the New York Supreme Court in Manhattan, presided over the hush money trial where a jury convicted Trump in May 2024 on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.
To say that I am a “critic” is actually a misnomer. It implies that there is rational thinking to criticize; I have upheld that there is not. A far more primitive dysfunction is what calls for emergent intervention.
Appropriate interventions that we have available are incarceration or hospitalization. These are quite apart from the political processes of the 25th Amendment or impeachment, of course, but can occur alongside them (we do not consider the 25th amendment a must before other medical conditions, such as the need for emergency surgery, and we certainly would not postpone treatment until the Amendment is fully implemented!).
The article continued:
On Sunday, she repeated that the president is “hospitalizable” and said the need is growing more urgent ahead of next week’s midterm elections, which she called “the most dangerous period in American history”….
Lee has not examined Trump…. The American Psychiatric Association’s “Goldwater Rule” says psychiatrists should not give professional opinions about public figures they have not examined.
Believing this overrules everything else is the result of “gaslighting” on the part of the APA, which ignored science, medical standards of practice, and its own members’ wishes, to procure a shiny building on Capitol Hill.
The truth is more complicated. Examination of issues outside of diagnosis, such as dangerousness, can in fact be more accurate from a distance, in real-life settings. I have also criticized mental health experts who do not make this distinction and distract the public with diagnoses. This not only gives ammunition to our critics (since diagnosis truly is complex and impossible to do definitively from afar without the full medical records). It also gives the impression that we can know everything without inpatient admission and detracts from the need for hospitalization (for which the criteria are dangerousness for mental health reasons). Afterward, we can do a full battery of tests and diagnose, for the benefit of treatment.
Initially, however, who cares if the impulsive aggression is from dementia or a psychotic spiral or both? Public safety—and the safety of the president—comes first, and we must contain. And this is the medical standard of care.
The Irish Star put it this way:
A top psychiatrist has claimed that Donald Trump “needs hospital-level care”…. Earlier this year, Dr. Lee co-signed an open letter demanding the POTUS’ removal from office. She joined 35 physicians in pressing the U.S. Government….
She explained [about hospitalization]: “The family member, the co-worker or the potential victim of the dangerous person would petition for hospitalization to the courts. And the courts can compel a psychiatric evaluation”….
Dr. Lee continued: “In this case, I believe we’ve made it clear and have tried to make it clear that from our end, we do see the president as being a danger to the public and hospitalizable.”
There is one snare, however, and I will discuss how to overcome it at the next and last of my series with Anthony Davis of “The Weekend Show” this Sunday, November 1, 2026!
Announcement:
Please join us for a PROJECT FOR HUMAN SURVIVAL interactive meeting today, October 28, 2026, at 11 a.m. EDT / 8 a.m. PDT. A meeting link will be sent to paid subscribers an hour before—and in the below.
Dr. Bandy X. Lee is inviting you to a live session:
Time: Oct 28, 2026 11:00 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/83438669344?pwd=BaKyWmQ3Vdouq0h2O4oubj7f1IGdEP.1
Meeting ID: 834 3866 9344
Passcode: 765143
Discussion about this post
https://bandyxlee.substack.com/p/trump-needs-hospital-level-care-as
Therapist working with abusive men for the past 16 years here. Agreed. Trump is the incarnation of psychiatrist Stephen Karpman’s dysfunctional “drama triangle”—the dynamics of which can only be socially devastating when coming from someone in a chief position of power with a psychological profile like that of Trump:
https://therapolitical.substack.com/p/trump-the-drama-triangle-and-our?r=5pnyfp&utm_medium=ios
Thank you again, Dr. Lee. In particular and as a psychologist, I find that the Trump/MAGA accusation of "Trump derangement syndrome" (and calling other people "sick") to be a textbook example of denial/projection. It's also a con artist's attempt to misdirect while cheating someone (see shell game). People have heard of the saying that pertains here, "Every accusation is a confession." Dr. Lee has persisted in educating the public about this terrible behavior. I also appreciate Dr. Lee's distancing from people who diagnose Trump in public forums, although I cannot help but be thankful for anybody who would broadcast how sick he is. VOTE