Lee v. Yale Univ., decided today by Judge Sarah Merriam (D. Conn.), was brought by Dr. Bandy Lee, a volunteer (uncompensated) clinical professor in the Yale School of Medicine's Law and Psychiatry Division. (This volunteer service required her to "participate in four hours of student-related, teaching, or supervisory activities per week. These activities could be satisfied through teaching a course, lectures, through advising students in connection with their thesis preparation, supervising residents, participating in seminars and grand rounds, engaging in scholarly activity, participating in department administration, and other activities.") She was fired on Sept. 4, 2020 for the following reasons:
[T]he review committee … consider[ed] whether the Department could offer you a continuing teaching role …. The key question in our minds was whether you had the clinical judgment and professionalism to teach trainees key aspects of their profession. Your diagnostic impressions of President Trump and several other public figures and your recommendations for treating President Trump played a role in our discussion. This was not because of the political content of your speech. As you know, the Department and the University publicly defended your academic freedom and your right to express your opinions as a citizen. As detailed below, the Committee's concern was what your diagnoses and treatment recommendations said about your clinical abilities and professionalism.
Since 2017, you have taken the position that you have a "duty to warn" the public that President Trump presents a threat to public safety. The duty to warn derives from the Tarasoff decision and subsequent legal developments, and it applies to clinicians in a treatment relationship with a potentially dangerous person. It has never been applied outside that context. In public comments, you said that President Trump was incapacitated by a psychiatric disorder, and you identified symptoms such as aggressive speech, sexual misconduct, incitement to violence, belief in conspiracies, declining cognitive functioning, and neurological deficits. Initially, you did not identify the disorder causing these supposed symptoms. In December 2019, you said publicly that President Trump exhibited a "pattern of delusions," was "lacking rational decisionmaking capacity," and had "definitive signs of severe pathology" that required "an advanced level of care." In January 2020, you called for "an involuntary evaluation" of President Trump, and you said, "I am beginning to believe a mental health hold … will become inevitable." That same month, you publicly suggested that President Trump, Rudolph Giuliani and Alan Dershowitz had a "shared psychosis."
