Talking Trump Mental Health with Bandy Lee

Dr. Bandy Lee is a forensic psychiatrist and an internationally recognized expert on violence. Trained in medicine and psychiatry at Yale and Harvard Universities, and in medical anthropology as a fellow of the National Institute of Mental Health, she is currently on the faculty of Yale School of Medicine’s Law and Psychiatry Division. She served as Director of Research for the Center for the Study of Violence (Harvard, U. Penn., N.Y.U., and Yale), co-founded Yale’s Violence and Health Study Group (MacMillan Center for International Studies), and leads a project group for the World Health Organization’s Violence Prevention Alliance. She has consulted with the governments of Ireland and France, as well as Alabama, California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York on violence prevention programming in prisons and in the community. She played a key role in initiating reforms at Rikers Island, New York City’s correctional facility known for extreme levels of violence. She has been teaching students studying to be public defenders and asylum attorneys at Yale Law School since 2003, and a Global Health Studies course of her design, “Violence: Causes and Cures,” since 2013. She has served as consultant to the World Health Organization Violence and Injury Prevention department, UNESCO, and other United Nations bodies, and as speaker to the World Economic Forum. Recent calls for her expertise have led to her co-founding and directing the World Mental Health Coalition, which assembles mental health experts to exchange with other disciplines on how they can collaboratively protect societal mental health.