Skeptic Ginger |
14th June 2021 11:17 PM |
March 2021: Academic Freedom and the Goldwater Rule
Quote:
Bandy Lee, a former Yale University faculty member in the Department of Psychiatry in the School of Medicine, filed suit in federal court March 22 against the University alleging “unlawful termination… due to her exercise of free speech about the dangers of Donald Trump’s presidency.” Lee charges that Yale fired her in response to a January 2020 tweet that characterized “just about all” of former president Donald Trump’s supporters as suffering from “shared psychosis” and said that Trump attorney Alan Dershowitz had “wholly taken on Trump’s symptoms by contagion.” Dershowitz then sent a letter to Yale administrators, in which he complained that Lee’s tweet constituted “a serious violation of the ethics rules of the American Psychiatric Association” and asked that she be disciplined. ...
In a September 4 letter to Lee, Krystal wrote that the termination “was not because of the political content” of her statements. Instead, he invoked her “repeated violations of the APA’s Goldwater Rule and your inappropriate transfer of the duty to warn from the treatment setting to national politics,” which, the letter claimed, “raised significant doubts about” Lee’s grasp of professional ethics in psychiatry.
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Dershowitz's handiwork on his crusade to install professors who align with people like himself and Trump.
A protest letter was sent:
Quote:
We rely on the report in the Yale Daily News (March 23, 2021) that quoted your letter terminating Dr. Lee as follows:
“Although the committee does not doubt that you are acting on the basis of your personal moral code,” the letter read, “your repeated violations of the APA’s Goldwater Rule and your inappropriate transfer of the duty to warn from the treatment setting to national politics raised significant doubts about your understanding of crucial ethical and legal principles in psychiatry.” ...
The validity of the Goldwater Rule has been widely disputed: many professionals consider it a scientifically untenable privileging of corporate psychiatry’s interests over individual psychiatrists’ rights of free speech and expressions of conscience (Lilienfeld, S., Miller, J., Lynam, D., The Goldwater Rule, Perspectives From, and Implications for, Psychological Science, Perspect Psychol Sci . 2018 Jan;13(1):3-27. doi: 10.1177/1745691617727864. Epub 2017 Oct 12; Post, J., Narcissism and Politics: Dreams of Glory, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015; Pouncey, C., President Trump’s Mental Health-Is It Morally Permissible for Psychiatrists to Comment?, New England Journal of Medicine 2018, 378 (5), pp. 405-407).
Additionally, the APA’s 2017 restatement of the Goldwater Rule broadened its wording to proscribe apparently any discussion by psychiatrists and, by extension, other mental health professionals, not only of putative diagnoses but of the psychology and behavior of public figures. This colonizing of scholarly discourse by the APA flies in the face of academic traditions of inquiry. ...
Further, Dr. Lee’s profound contributions to the field (Lee, B. editor. The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump; St. Martin’s Press, 2017, p. 83-93) would have been impossible if she allowed herself to be gagged by the Goldwater Rule. Bearing in mind that the 37 contributors to this book which Dr. Lee edited include many scholars and international exemplars of psychiatric ethics, we wonder if they too would be terminated were they to be members of your department.
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There is a well established body of professionals with relevant expertise who side with me and others in this thread.
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