Social and forensic psychiatrist Bandy Lee, who in 2017 gave us the book The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President (see previous post) just released her newest, The Psychology of Trump Contagion: An Existential Danger to American Democracy and All Humankind. In it she expands upon her and her colleagues’ earlier warnings.
“Contagion is different from rational decision making or even cynical political calculation: it has the quality of being wildly irrational, and sometimes the affected person does not see it—even to one’s detriment. Much of contagion is unconscious, induces more dramatic and rapid shifts than rational persuasion, occurs in large part in the absence of awareness, and persists despite the damage to self or one’s larger community, such as country.”
Selected quotes from Lee’s recent interview with Lucas McGranahan, TAP Magazine (The American Psychoanalyst), which addresses some key points from The Psychology of Trump Contagion:
We normally don’t think of mental symptoms as spreading, but I would argue that they are even more contagious than physical symptoms, because you don’t require physical exposure for the symptoms to spread. It’s been shown through social media studies how quickly negative emotions, and even more so mental symptoms, could spread.
[On the concept of narcissistic symbiosis]: …(O)ne projects oneself as an all-powerful leader, and the others fall in line as followers who believe that they can experience power by aligning themselves with such a leader. There’s a kind of magnetic attraction that happens subconsciously, irrationally, and almost chemically, so that no amount of persuasion could help lead them out of this kind of symbiosis.
Shared psychosis is the end result of Trump contagion. The contagion spreads from a powerful public figure with severe symptoms, first among vulnerable individuals, but eventually even among the normal population. It is called shared psychosis because each individual person may not be psychotic, but the entire group acts as if they were—that is, detached from reality.
What ultimately determines a society’s general tendency for violence is structural violence, or inequality. This is what is behind what I have been calling our “collective suicidality.” We are currently in a death spiral because of extreme inequality, which has driven self-destructive politics, organized crime, rampant behavioral violence, and existential dangers.
Selected quotes from The Psychology of Trump Contagion:
Dangerous individuals do not stop but are emboldened with each absence of accountability.
…(W)hat matters is not whether a person is mentally ill but whether he is dangerous.
…(F)ascism is not a political ideology but mental pathology in politics.
Videos of recent interviews with Lee can be seen on The Weekend Show with Meidas Touch, available on YouTube here.
