Speaking up About Trump an Experience of a Lifetime

Being involved in global violence prevention and dealing with genocides, gender-based violence, civil wars, and suicides, the last thing on my mind was domestic partisan politics. Yet the issue invaded my world the morning after the 2016 presidential election, starting at 8:00 a.m., when my phone was ringing off the hook and emails were flooding in from civil society organizations, patient advocacy groups, lawyers, students, activists, civil servants, and documentary filmmakers — mostly those I had engaged with over prison reform in this country — all afraid of the violence that was to come.

And they were right. In the midst of answering those calls, I had to ask myself: If I have devoted my career to studying, predicting, and preventing violence, could I turn away now, in the face of potentially the greatest risk of violence we could ever confront?

At that time, a former colleague from Harvard, Dr. Judith Herman, had written to President Obama, along with two other brave women, Drs. Nanette Gartrell and Dee Mosbacher, asking that the president-elect undergo a neuropsychiatric evaluation. I started composing letters myself, but those around me, while unanimously agreeing that the situation was dangerous, would not put their names to any letter. They were essentially afraid that they would spend the rest of their careers fighting for their licenses in light of a vindictive, litigious president, or that they may have to fear for their and their family's lives in light of his violence-prone followers. I thought to myself that this was not good, that we needed to break the ice, and perhaps a conference would do it. Therefore, I organized a town-hall-style discussion with a panel at my institution, the Yale School of Medicine.

Foremost on my mind was ethics—on what basis should we speak (or am I missing something?), and how can we speak ethically and responsibly? There was this ethical guideline we informally call “the Goldwater rule,” which d