A Yale professor who briefed lawmakers in Washington D.C. about President Donald Trump’s mental fitness is not licensed to practice psychiatry in her home state of Connecticut and violated ethics guidance recently issued by the American Psychiatric Association.
Lee deleted her Twitter account after screenshots surfaced of her expired license.
That guidance reaffirmed APA’s support of “The Goldwater Rule,” which every member psychiatrist has had to abide by since 1973. The rule states that “it is unethical to offer a professional opinion about an individual without conducting an examination.”
The rule was created after Fact magazine surveyed 2,417 psychiatrists in 1964 and asked if Sen. Barry Goldwater, a presidential candidate at the time, was fit to serve as president. A total 1,189 psychiatrists responded that Goldwater was unfit to serve. Goldwater later won a defamation suit against Fact magazine.
Lee told CNN that at least one of the lawmakers was Republican.
White House press secretary Sarah Sanders called questions about the president’s fitness to serve “disgraceful.”
“If he was unfit, he probably wouldn’t be sitting there, wouldn’t have defeated the most qualified group of candidates the Republican Party has ever seen,” Sanders said, before praising Trump as an “incredibly strong” leader.
Trump dismissed the comments himself in a string of three Twitter messages.
According to the bio, Lee has consulted the governments of Ireland and France as well as California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York “on violence prevention programming in prisons and in the community.”
“She has served as consultant to the World Health Organization Violence and Injury Prevention department, UNESCO, and other United Nations bodies, and as speaker to the World Economic Forum,” her bio states.
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