In Conversation with Psychiatrist Bandy Lee: The Freedom of Mind and Why We Need It (more than ever)
Today I have the great pleasure of interviewing my colleague Bandy Lee. She is a world-renowned forensic psychiatrist and violence prevention specialist who for several years now has led the World Mental Health Coalition[i] which is a group of mental health mental health experts who formed together to warn of the dangers posed by Donald Trump to the United States and the wider world. I’ve invited Bandy to take part in this interview to discuss one key part of her work for which she’s less well-known: her work on Freedom of Mind®[ii] and, in particular, her role in authoring the first ever Declaration of Freedom of Mind[iii] in history.
The Declaration of the Freedom of Mind articulates freedom of mind in a written declaration for the first time. As such, it opens up exciting new ways to promote freedom of mind as a human right, including the prospect of proposing the Declaration to the United Nations for adoption. As my readership may know, I’m currently preparing doctoral research to identify a political and legal pathway for freedom of mind to enter into the international human rights system.
The Freedom of Mind: An Introduction
Matt: When and how did you first become familiar with the concept of Freedom of Mind?
Bandy: I wouldn’t say that I had an academic introduction to the topic, it was really on the ground, in a very clinical treatment setting. As I was working as a psychiatrist, it was remarkable to me how patients would describe the emancipation they felt once they were out of their episode of illness. Often times I would have sent them kicking and screaming to a forced hospitalization where they would be forcibly medicated and during those times I would feel that my rapport with the patient is now forever gone because I had done such awful things to them against their will. But the most surprising thing is that they would return to thank me and they would be very grateful that I did what I did. The mental oppression that they were under during that bout of illness seemed to far outweigh anything that I had done. They would often go into the ambulance and while in my office they continued to be subject to a lot of restraints and forced treatment, but they would double down and insist that whatever they were saying is what they wish, what they desired and they would not consider any help or treatment from their condition. But once they were released from that mental oppression, it seemed that the peace and the freedom they felt was so great that they were willing to let go of any of the cherished ideas they clung to vigorously before.
Matt: And these were patients suffering from mental illness or suffering from a situational affliction such as a criminal gang or a cult?
Bandy: These were initially those suffering from straightforward mental illness. I worked in state hospitals where patients would get pretty ill or in state clinics, and then I moved on to a career working in prisons where I would encounter the same situation from former gang members. In fact, being a part of gangs is almost like being part of a cult where their own thinking and their mind is in a sense hijacked to meet the needs of the leader and to align themselves in a very conformative way to espouse a new doctrine or set of rules or way of being that defies the mainstream world.
Matt: And as you pursued your career in psychiatry, was the phrase “Freedom of Mind” something in the lexicon at the time?
Bandy: Actually it didn’t come up very much in psychiatric settings and it’s seldom explicitly discussed, but I find it to be the goal of all treatment. Ultimately the goal of treatment is to enhance a person’s mental health agency and freedom and ability to choose in ways that would support whatever avenue of life they choose. That’s why the practice of psychiatry or mental health has no political affiliation or no ideological leanings — yes, they say we lean to the left but I didn’t find that particularly so, especially in psychiatry. Nevertheless, our aim is always the same to help the patient, the human being, achieve their own potential which includes Freedom of Mind.
Matt: I’ve done a deep dive on the history of Freedom of Mind and how it appears in the literature and in Buddhist and other spiritual writings. Freedom of Mind is described as an inner peace, freedom for the raw and uncontrolled processes of the mind, as I like to say a kind of freedom from the mind itself! Is that a description you would subscribe to and does it overlap with the psychiatric definition or understanding of Freedom of Mind?
Bandy: I personally would say it overlaps because in the two situations I described one is experiencing mental oppression or even subjugation to this mental pathology. This is an extreme situation but I think we all carry that condition to a certain degree and the only way to be free of it is to find spaces in our mind where we can free ourselves from the world’s conditioning. The world is very wounded and I think most psychiatrists would agree with that, but it is also a barrier to us recognizing the true freedom we have and the freeing quality of reality. So, in order to perceive that reality without the fetters of our conditioning and worldly messages of what is and what ought to be, then we can attain a greater state of freedom. And that happens in Buddhist practice through meditation, in other religions it may happen through prayer, confession, so I think the ultimate goal of all spiritual traditions is to try to obtain that that greater state of not only emotional health but spiritual health.
Matt: You’ve been open about your spirituality and religious faith. For you, what does an approach to religion that’s in accordance with Freedom of Mind look like?
Bandy: Well I think the goal of religion is freedom. As I described earlier, it’s freedom from constraints of the world, of one’s own mind, and an embracing of truth, our almost limit limitless eternal reality, so the fact that the truth makes us free according to the Christian Bible is something that I relate to very well. I studied religion, divinity studies specifically, at the same time as my medical degree at the time to humanize my medical education, but it turned out to be an incredible resource for healing, engaging patients and prisoners who are often in dire situations and desperate for that kind of language. I think ultimately it points to all our yearning as human beings. Of course, religious traditions don’t necessarily reflect that but I think the goal of all religions is to free us from all from all our chains, the chains we create or those that are imposed on us, to experience our essence and our eternal being, our selfhood which is very free and can be seen as a heightened state of mental health because mental health itself is not just the absence of mental disease.
Matt: In my research on the history of Freedom of Mind, the oldest literature reference I found was at the end of the 16th century, followed by a massive increase in usage at the time of the Enlightenment, the French and American Revolutions and the anti-colonial independence struggles that followed.
Can you talk about your study of history, in particular the Enlightenment and the origin of thoughts that led to the French and American Revolutions and how it helped inform your work and current approach?
Bandy: Yes, Freedom of Mind is very much a part of Enlightenment philosophy, at least it’s embedded in in the concepts. I think you’re referring to my pre-medical school studies where I studied Enlightenment philosophy, especially Scottish and French literature, and I was very inspired by Enlightenment ideals because it pointed to a greater state of societal mental health. Of course I didn’t call it that at the time, but there was a great deal of freeing of the mind, educating self, and becoming self-reliant so as to be able to govern themselves and it was a great revolution in thought.
Matt: In the French literature, Jean-Jacques Rousseau is quoted as saying to the effect that the human spirit is free but corporal humans are in chains. Does this reflect a presumption of the Enlightenment that the mind is free and that now the body needed to be free? And how do you consider this presumption — can we say that it’s faulty in retrospect?
Bandy: Well, Jean-Jacques Rousseau may be said to be the first anthropologist and that he was the first person to reflect on studying human beings. I think they were just awakening to their own mental freedom, so I wouldn’t say it’s so much a defect. But they were awakening to this mental freedom that they were recognizing that they had and that they thought that the physical freedom should come as a consequence, that since they had mental freedom they were also entitled to physical freedom. What I think they had not encountered at that time — they were still in the ancien regime which was very monarchical and dictatorial — was the mental slavery that would be used as a weapon against those who are nominally free. In other words, they hadn’t yet conceived of a situation where you could be physically free but mentally enslaved.
Matt: Anti-colonial activists such as Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X all underscored that true slavery starts with the mind, and mental slavery features very strongly in the Declaration that you helped to author. In your work in psychiatry and violence prevention, how did you encounter the phenomenon of mental slavery?
Bandy: I encountered it especially among violent offenders because they were my main population of patients whom I treated. Often times they were quite mentally afflicted but they often believed that they were leading intelligent and clever lives, that they were gaining status and power above others and they did not see how they were giving up their greater potential, let alone the fact that they would end up in prison for long periods of time if not the rest of their lives. Often times they would do so in the spur of the moment to prove their dignity, fighting for their own pride, basically fighting to the death somebody who disrespected them. They were willing to do that because they had this notion that that kind of thinking was serving them and they would also cheat, lie and do other bad things to people believing that they were winning, despite the fact that they often ended up poor, convicted and again incarcerated. So, I found that they were often victims of their own mental enslavement and it often did not occur on their own but was induced by a larger culture they were a part of — often gangs and cliques where the leader is inculcating in them this way of thinking so that they would worship the leader and follow the leader as well as do their bidding. So in other words, they had to believe they had an internal not an external locus of control despite the contrary situation. Even younger people who would join gangs thought that they were coming into something that was wonderful, a place where they could be affirmed, where they would have a family, opportunity, the potential for advancement because they were doing so poorly in in the outside world. You come into a world where the rules are reversed and you have the chance to come on top rather than at the bottom, but then they are led to doing things that lead them to trouble and cannot pull themselves out of and still they have to continue to convince themselves that they have made the right choice because the alternative is too devastating. Often times I’ve treated gang members who had to kill police officers in order to be initiated into the gang or kill a poor homeless person for example, so the guilt of that and the feeling that they would be vulnerable to being held accountable for these actions if they left the group and lacked people to watch over them prevents them from freeing themselves from that mentality.
Matt: As the threats to the mind have grown over the past few decades, our scientific understanding of what happens to someone whose mind is compromised in a process of mind control has grown. There are various theories of a cult-self or pseudo-personality. Do you have a preferred framing for how someone’s Freedom of Mind is compromised in high-control authoritarian environments, be it a cult, a gang or whatever?
Bandy: I would say I consider it in terms of usurpation of personality and agency in order to turn human beings into tools instruments to the cult leader’s desires.
Matt: Today, Freedom of Mind is strongly associated with the work of cult expert and licensed counselor Dr Steven Hassan, who actually is the person who I learned the term Freedom of Mind from originally. He has authored a book of that title, and runs the Freedom of Mind Resource Center which helps coach families and friends on how to help loved ones ensnared by authoritarian cults as well as assisting people wishing to heal from abusive cultic experiences. More recently, he released the book The Cult of Trump which explains in-depth how Donald Trump uses a wide range of mind control techniques that originate from authoritarian cults.
Matt: How did your work come to dovetail with Steven Hassan’s work, and what have been the main lessons learned from the rise of authoritarian cults over the last few decades?
Bandy: I think just for the reasons you described — the Trump era became a vast authoritarian cult following, very much like any other cult or gang — it’s through mental manipulation. There’s a reason that anti-apartheid activist Steven Biko said that the mind is tyranny’s battleground. It’s their battleground for power and in order for a dangerous unfit individual to rise to power he has to manipulate people’s minds.
I first started speaking up against Donald Trump when as soon as he was elected, and soon thereafter I convened the conference at the Yale School of Medicine on the professional responsibility we had as psychiatrists and psychologists to warn against his dangerous psychology and that led to our publishing a New York Times bestseller, unprecedented of its kind I was told, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. Now, when I published this book, I emphasized the fact that the problem of Donald Trump was a public health problem. In other words, I was thinking ahead to the fact that someone of such severe mental impairments and such serious symptoms would spread those symptoms through his powerful position and exposure to the public, and spread symptoms in a way where his followers will carry on his beliefs. Especially if they’re delusional, they would become paranoid and violence prone as he is and eventually become tools to be able to carry out his wishes, be it a violent insurrection against the government or to threaten and intimidate judges and juries to ruling in his direction and to becoming such loyal fervent followers such that entire power structures and institutions would align with him, including the media, because they see that there’s great revenue or great approval to be had through that alignment. And so even though the personality Cult of Trump is not a literal cult — people have not been isolated and are not separated from their loved ones — you still have the same effect psychologically because he has immunized people from other sources of information such as the news and he has bound them more closely to him than their own family members and friends.
Matt: Yes, personally I prefer the term ‘The Cults of Trump’ because it’s not one group — it’s multiple authoritarian groups that have coalesced.
Background to the Declaration
Matt: Let me take you forward to February 17, 2020, President’s Day. On that day, the World Mental Health Coalition held a meeting with citizens’ organizers in New York City and released the first Declaration of Freedom of Mind in history. At that time, you noted “a public not lacking in resources or will but gripped with disappointment demoralization and despair at a government’s unconcern for its citizens. Its failure to grasp a problem of mental health had resulted in its failure of even a political process impeachment and removal and the psychological oppression of a populace was proving to be the most pernicious form of oppression of all”.[iv] Take us back to the time of the first impeachment of Donald Trump — what was the activity of the World Mental Health Coalition and how did it result in producing the Declaration of Freedom of Mind?
Bandy: I think there was a great deal of discontent on the part of the people and they were recognizing that their will was being thwarted not through a legitimate process but through various psychological tricks that were being done in order to make the impeachment process unsuccessful. Many attribute that to the Senate: not holding a trial, not hearing any evidence or witnesses and simply dismissing the case. That may be true but from my perspective it was because we had not dealt with a psychological phenomenon that was happening, which I was calling “Trump Contagion” at the time or “shared psychosis” in other settings, and that enough of the population had succumbed to taking on the same symptoms and beliefs as Donald Trump that they would not be able to see or that facts or evidence would not even matter.
So while I was sensing a great deal of distress I called a meeting in Union Square Park in in the middle of February in New York City and quite a few people came and we discussed how such meetings were occurring in the times of the Revolutionary War, basically the Declaration of Independence and all manner of documents had formed from such spontaneous assemblies and so I wished to count it as an assembly. I took down what people desired, what people thought of various assessments that we were making as mental health professionals in terms of where the population was, how to deal with this public mental health crisis in my view, and ultimately it was obvious to everyone that a large part of the population was not mentally free and in fact was voting against their own will, subscribing to ideas and facts that didn’t serve them because they’re unreal, and that mental slavery was now an issue because of the spread of symptoms as well as the psychological manipulation at the national level. So that’s the psychological aspect of what often happens in cults or gangs and so highlighting that it seemed that we needed a way to articulate it as well as to formulate solutions. So the work of Dr Steven Hassan on authoritarian cults was part of our inspiration for writing the Declaration, who I contacted at that time and we ran drafts of the Declaration by, before the board of the World Mental Health Coalition unanimously approved it. So that’s where the Declaration of the Freedom of Mind came from.
Matt: Could you talk briefly about the dialogue you had with members of Congress regarding the first impeachment and why ultimately it wasn’t successful in convincing American government policy makers about the psychological nature of the Trump problem?
Bandy: Yes, I’m very glad you brought up that point because in times of authoritarianism the key action that is taken almost uniformly in the beginning is to neutralize truth tellers — the journalists mainly and then intellectuals are either rounded up or somehow otherwise gagged. I mentioned we published The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrist and Mental Health Experts Assess a President, which became an unexpected New York Times bestseller which in turn spoke to the thirst of the public. So the public was aware and hungry for this information and in fact we had MacMillan as our publisher — they’re one of the big five publishers and yet it took them five weeks to catch up with the demand; finally they did, reprinting after reprinting not to run out in an hour or two because it was instantly sold out. Within three months we were the number one topic of national conversation and in the end I was invited by over 50 Congress members to speak with them. Initially it was about the 25th Amendment which would have been an appropriate intervention: that’s when a President becomes mentally unable and when the cabinet and Vice-President won’t take action, Congress can form another body that can initiate the process. Representative Jamie Raskin at the time was leading this charge and intended to include mental health experts in that other body. But they were also discussing impeachment at that time so if the 25th Amendment were difficult to do or undoable, impeachment was another avenue for removing a mentally incapacitated president because it covered high crimes and misdemeanors, and misdemeanors cover demeanors of someone who is mentally unfit. So at the height of our consulting and speaking in public, in fact they charged us with continuing to do our education in public because only if we educated the public medically could they intervene politically. That astonished me because they were actually relying on us which is the way it should be that intervention should be done not for political reasons but for reasons that are of reality as assessed by experts and the people who are best positioned to evaluate the situation. So it was very encouraging; in fact, a journalist at the time told us that we had arrived and in other words we had set the stage for an intervention to happen.
And it was right at that moment that the American Psychiatric Association (APA) stepped in with the New York Times and went on an aggressive disinformation campaign that completely defamed us as being unethical armchair psychiatrists — a kind of really aggressive language that I had never seen from a professional association — but it had the effect along with the New York Times of denouncing us, blacking us out from the media almost completely within two or three weeks. Up to that point I had been invited by all the major news programs cable and network, I was interviewing 15 hours a day every single day, I thought it important enough an issue for me to drop everything and accept all these interviews. But within a few weeks they had almost all dried up; there were at least 70 interviews to which I was invited and were all cancelled that last minute or were recorded and not aired except for one or two years later. The same with the New York Times: there were reporters who continued to reach out to me, it was right after I was on the front page and there were at least a dozen articles from which only my quotes were deleted. And so one has to wonder if the media believed it were important enough, even though the public were demanding this information: every time we published an article it was the number one most read of that day, weekend, week etc.
We were completely barred in a sense that we don’t hear from mental health experts at all anymore and the public had become acculturated to this condition that placed them in grave danger. I would say this condition is responsible for 1.2 million preventable American deaths due to Covid-19 mismanagement, for the violent insurrection that almost overturned the government and American democracy, for the upending of the world order to a point where we’re experiencing such geopolitical instability and conflict in ways that would not have occurred without the full presidency of Donald Trump and his second and third candidacy — all of this in my view could have been prevented.
Matt: So the word that came to my mind was a chilling effect — would that be accurate?
Bandy: Yes absolutely, and it continued because not only the APA’s Goldwater rule which is what they advanced as the reason for silencing all mental health experts even though it only applies to their members — no licensing board has adopted it, no other Association has adopted it, so it only applied to about 6% of mental health professionals which are their own members — and yet they made it seem like it was the law, if not a universal rule. It’s not even supposed to be a rule, no one has been disciplined for violating it, and they had no jurisdiction over myself as I had resigned from the APA in 2007 because they were accepting so much funding from pharmaceutical industries.
And now, it turned out that they did what they did was to completely silencing mental health discourse by professionals in order to protect their federal funding and they did receive windfalls of funding under the Trump Administration that enabled them to buy a building in the middle of Washington DC in ways that were unprecedented in their history. So these are the kinds of compromises and collusions that happen during authoritarian times that actually facilitate the advancement of authoritarianism.
Matt: So, absent that intervention from the American Psychiatric Association (APA), you believe that the policy makers in the government would have been much more receptive to hearing your input and proposals?
Bandy: Absolutely, because I sensed no barrier until that time. In fact, I was quite impressed and pleasantly surprised. I thought that the great mental health awareness campaigns that happened, especially during the Obama years but in the decades preceding, actually had had an effect because it seemed at that time that the producers and hosts of high-profile shows had no barrier to inviting the relevant experts, even in the field of mental health. But it went from that to complete going back at least 100 years in mental health advancement in the kind of stigmatization to the point of total blockage of discourse, when all the literature shows that to reduce stigma you have to speak about the issue. Knowledge and discussion are antidotes to stigma and we’ve gone back to the state of stigmatization of the entire field itself where it remains the only field where the experts are not allowed to speak about the area of their expertise.
The Declaration of the Freedom of Mind
Matt: The preamble to the Declaration describes the Freedom of Mind as a right that is derived from the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizen which was adopted in France following the overthrow of the monarchy. How did the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizen inform the Declaration?
Bandy: Yes, I modeled it after the French Declaration of Rights of Man which was of a great inspiration for me and in terms of conceptualizing what mental freedom can do, but as you stated, it was assumed at that time in history that mental freedom was a given and that only physical slavery needed to be prevented, so the language lacks what true freedom from mental slavery requires. Of course, there was after that the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights which again speaks of all forms of freedom and freedom from all forms of slavery but it does not specify mental slavery and it does not either define it or suggest ways of preventing it. That’s why I thought that a declaration addressing this issue was needed at this time. And so I started drafting it and enlisted a number of members from the World Mental Health Coalition to assist with it and this is what we ended up with, which very surprisingly you picked up and is having a life of its own now!
Matt: so for the readership: before I began my work on developing and promoting Freedom of Mind, I had never heard of Bandy, I knew about The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump but not the background. So when I spotted the Declaration of Freedom of Mind online, I reached out to Bandy a few years ago and the rest is history!
Let’s turn to the substance of the Declaration itself. Mental slavery is defined as an absence of mental freedom and, in turn, mental freedom is defined as having agency over one’s own mind. The Declaration explicitly names and prohibits all the main variants of mind control, such as disinformation, psychological abuse and thought reform. The Declaration also states that ‘there shall be no abridging of speech, of the press, or of access to expertise when the people desire peaceably to assemble around matters that affect their mental health’. What this does is to upgrade the freedom of speech in relation to mental health to an unqualified right, that is, a right from which there can be no exemptions, even in times of emergency. Lastly, the Declaration provides a freedom to fully access information and the best available knowledge and expertise. Why, in the context of the Trump Contagion, full access to best available knowledge and expertise was quite so important?
Bandy: Well, it describes the phenomenon of how the mind can be usurped. It would be able to educate the public in ways that would help them to detect the early signs, not to be psychologically manipulated into committing themselves so far in that they couldn’t pull themselves out any longer, like the kinds of sacrifices I mentioned before regarding joining gangs, such as killing a police officer or killing a homeless person, child soldiers who are ordered to kill family members in order to pledge and demonstrate their loyalty to the leaders and the regime. And you might say that Donald Trump’s followers to a large extent have sacrificed their own their own well-being, some have given their lives following his defiance against Covid-19 measures, we see others carrying all kinds of paraphernalia to identify themselves as being part of that cult, they’ve spent enormous amounts of their own wealth that they may not have had and their own personal commitment, and many have severed relations with family and friends.
So prevention was critical before all this happened, and how do you know how to prevent something that hasn’t happened? It’s through scholarship research and expert knowledge of those who have dealt with this kind of behavior symptoms, pathology on a daily basis and have made it their career to detect, prevent, manage and contain these phenomena. Just because it’s happening at national scale does not mean that it’s something else, it’s still a phenomenon of mental pathology. I’ve often said that fascism is not a political ideology but a mental pathology. Politics follows the principles of psychiatry more so than anything else, and to treat it as normal politics, well we see where it has gotten us, he almost won the presidency and very well might even this time around unless we can deal with it for the issue that it is.
Matt: And by fascism, are you referring to authoritarianism?
Bandy: Yes, I’m lumping all these together because for me it’s the psychological impairment that is important, the developmental woundedness, not so much what it’s called.
Matt: Every human right has positive and negative freedoms: a freedom to access certain services or engage in activities and freedom from some type of violation or negative action. The Declaration is a skilled combination of the two types of freedom.
As you drafted the Declaration, were you conscious of defining Freedom of Mind in a positive and not just a negative sense, what it is as well as what it’s not?
Bandy: Well, you will see in parts of the Declaration where it reads that having access to information, having access to an environment where the mind can grow, not just assuming that the mind will exist. So that in my view is a positive concept of Freedom of Mind. There is a negative concept in terms of the removal of mental slavery, which I think is where the other declarations were lacking, especially when the individuals themselves do not believe that they are enslaved, and I think that’s a very important notion to be aware of because what happens at a time of mental slavery is that you are deprived even of the awareness that you are being enslaved.
Matt: There are other types of rights phrasing that weren’t included in the Declaration, such as mental privacy, mental autonomy, to some extent mental integrity, also psychological violence. Was there a discussion about which particular rights phrasings to use and not to use?
Bandy: Those things were of course considered because of the current situation and the problems that we were undergoing. At the time I chose not to include them in order to keep it simple, and because I think in terms of primary, secondary and tertiary prevention of disease. Tertiary prevention is intervening with individuals who are sick or society that is sick, secondary prevention is intervening with those who are at risk of being ill, primary prevention is intervening at the population level. I’m appealing to the part of the population that is healthy and can work toward greater levels of health, so I wasn’t so much thinking in terms of intervening with, for example, the psychological violence that is happening or the mental integrity that might be violated, for example through torture or hardship, and mental privacy I wasn’t aware of until you brought it up.
Matt: For the readership, in 1975 now-retired judge Garland Burrell Jr. wrote a journal article calling a call for an international human right to mental privacy.[v] He drew attention to violent predations by Soviet psychiatrists such forced lobotomies and chemical-based interventions, and the framing he used was a human right to mental privacy.
However, one of the issues with mental privacy is that it’s defined in the negative sense because it is protecting against some sort of invasion from outside. Therefore, it falls on the negative side of freedoms.
Bandy: Perhaps we could create a supplement for the negative freedoms but I felt that the positive freedoms were important to define, especially because we have no notion to begin with. It’s not a mere absence of slavery.
Matt: So, whenever I give presentations, I always underline freedom of mind has to define itself for what it is for and not simply what it’s not. I don’t believe in negative identities, we should always define ourselves in the positive sense: what we are or aspire to be.
The Future of Freedom and the Mind
Matt: There’s a saying to the effect that all great ideas become co-opted. With respect to Freedom of Mind, authoritarian actors will invariably co-opt the language of mental freedom in order to use it for slavery, and this has already happened. What can we do to prevent this?
Bandy: Yes, the Orwellian reversal of terms where freedom is slavery and peace is war and so on, that is actually very explainable psychiatrically: this called denial, projection and inversion of reality. So if we see mental health and freedom, and freedom comes with mental health because when we have access to full information and can guard our mental health as well as all its potentials, then we will not be drawn into that kind of rhetoric, we will not be misguided or fooled. And having access to mental health expertise is part of the solution because if we were truly free, why should we not have access to the best available knowledge and the treasures of human civilization? It is our wealth that we can use to our ends, and so all of that works together.
Matt: In your book The Psychology of Trump Contagion: An Existential Threat to American Democracy and All Humankind, you write that “human beings are essentially astonishingly… human freedom applies equally to the people who have agency as the healthy mind is resilient, resourceful and creative under almost all circumstances”.
My question for you is this: would we not be in the situation we’re in currently if humans were not somewhat predisposed to surrendering their will and agency to the authoritarian leader of the day? Do you think there is something in the human spirit that eschews responsibility and the consequences of freedom?
Bandy: It’s easy to think that too much freedom may not be a good thing but it’s not freedom that is threatening but the abuse of freedom. Abuses occur when we have mistaken notions of what would benefit ourselves: if we have a limited definition of who we are, if we think that we are only our individual bodies, then hurting others could be helpful to ourselves or taking things from others could add to what we have. But if we think of ourselves as much more expansive — that’s the eternal, omnipresent idea in a sense — then we would not exploit what we have.
Thank you for mentioning my book. I was trying to describe the Trump Contagion that has come to the point of imperiling our entire nation as well as the world as an extreme version of a self-destructive pathology. Now the opposite end of that is health and when we have that heightened health we don’t invert ideas but embrace true ideas such as power, love, peace and oneness. These things are ideas that are often co-opted by those with other intentions, but in fact if we go back to the original meaning of these words then we will find that they are all-encompassing and there cannot be exceptions: you cannot hate another and love yourself, you cannot denigrate others and elevate yourself. Eventually we recognize that all are responsible for all, and that’s the state to which we could strive for. We’re very far from it which is the reason why I have stated that even those of us who are “normal and healthy” still have the same challenges and same limitations as we see in someone who is quite mentally-afflicted, and so we can often we can easily draw an analogy where we ourselves are our own slaves to our own imprisonment and to our own limiting ideas that that keep us bound.
Matt: You didn’t say this in your book but what I’m hearing right now is “none of us are free until all of us are free”. Does that describe how you are thinking?
Bandy: Yes, or, each one of us, if we can be truly free ourselves, will contribute to the freedom of all.
Matt: I can’t think for a better place to finish, so thank you for taking part in this interview.
Bandy: Thank you for having me.
[ii] Freedom of Mind® is a registered trademark of Freedom of Mind Resource Center, Inc.
[iii] https://worldmhc.org/declaration-of-the-freedom-of-mind
[iv] https://bandyxlee.medium.com/declaration-of-the-freedom-of-mind-f093fa0cd711
[v] https://scholarlycommons.law.cwsl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1846&context=cwilj
