As for the Goldwater Rule itself, it is essentially a gag order, part of the code of ethics of the American Psychiatric Association. In 1974, a trial known as the Tarasoff case established the law - now in force in 38 states - saying that if a patient is in imminent danger of physically hurting someone, his or her doctor may break confidentiality and alert the likely victim or call the police. “Duty to Warn” is a term with some history. Photo: Robert A Lisak/Yale School of Medicine We have a ‘Duty to Warn,’ about a leader who is dangerous to the health and security of our patients.” She has formed a coalition by that name, and it now comprises almost 800 mental-health professionals who are “sufficiently alarmed that they feel the need to speak up about the mental-health status of the president.” Gartner has posted a similar petition on the web, and it has attracted 41,000 signatures, a high proportion of them from mental-health practitioners. Lee, a diminutive Yale psychiatry professor who organized the meeting, puts it this way: “The Goldwater Rule is not absolute. This moment (which itself is “unprecedented”) led to an open town-hall meeting on Thursday, at Yale Medical School, to discuss the elephant in the room. Now in private practice in New York City, he answers his own rhetorical question. “Does Trump need to lie to my face for me to know he lies all the time?” asks Gartner. They’re not worrying about whether 300 million Americans are vulnerable to the life-and-death actions taken by this abnormal president.” And he and an increasing number of his colleagues are ready to declare that President Trump, whose actions are often described with neutral terms like “unprecedented,” is in fact dangerously ill. “The American Psychiatric Association looks out for the welfare of its members, to protect them from lawsuits. John Gartner, a psychologist and former faculty member at Johns Hopkins Medical School. The Hippocratic oath to First Do No Harm - sworn to Apollo the physician - has been turned into a self-serving hypocritical oath, charges Dr. In the face of minimal trust at home and abroad in President Donald Trump’s stability and his tenuous grasp of reality, a group of eminent professionals are daring to depart from the party line and declaring exception to the rule. Psychiatrists and psychologists operate under a norm - the so-called Goldwater Rule - that their professional organizations made up in 1973, forbidding them from diagnosing public figures they haven’t been able to evaluate in person. Yet most members of one profession have been hiding in plain sight. “Unhinged,” “delusional,” “deranged,” “sadistic,’ “sexual predator” - these are only a few of the labels slapped on Donald Trump by pundits, national-security chiefs, even U.S.
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