[Note: This is a followup to Hank Reichman's earlier post on the AAUP's Academe Blog, where this piece is also cross-posted.]
Hank Reichman’s recent post on the Bandy Lee case at the Yale Medical School raises an important point that deserves some further consideration. To recap, Dr. Lee has sued Yale for firing her from an unpaid, part-time position in the psychiatry department. Lee’s offense involved tweeting about the mental health of Donald Trump and Alan Dershowitz, asserting, for example, that they suffered from a “shared psychosis.”
Yale’s psychiatry department chair, John Krystal, notified Lee that she would be terminated if she continued tweeting about Trump’s (or presumably anyone’s) mental health. Such tweets, Krystal informed Lee, constituted violations of the American Psychiatric Association’s so-called “Goldwater Rule,” which declares it unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion or diagnosis “about an individual who is in the light of public attention . . .unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement.”
Lee kept tweeting along the same lines, and Krystal eventually dismissed her for “repeated violations of the APA’s Goldwater Rule” which “raised significant doubts about” her “clinical judgment and professionalism.”
Upon learning of Lee’s dismissal, a group of prominent psychiatrists and psychologists wrote an open letter to Krystal, objecting to Yale’s invocation of the Goldwater Rule and noting that “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 psychiatrist’s rights of free speech and expressions of conscience.”
Reichman cautiously tends to agree with Lee’s supporters. Recognizing the possibly different standards for faculty in professional schools, he concludes that “in Lee’s case,” the violation of a controversial ethical standard should not “justify a finding of lack of fitness.”
I am not a fan of the Goldwater Rule, and I tend to agree that it has outlived whatever usefulness it might once have had. It is certainly controversial within the psychiatry profession, especially in the age of Donald Trump. I am more or less inclined to agree with Lee’s defenders, but there is another side that is at least worth considering.
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