Bandy x Lee “follie a deuce”
Executive summary
The phrase "Bandy x Lee ‘follie a deuce’" does not appear in the provided reporting, and there is no direct evidence in those sources tying Dr. Bandy X. Lee to a term spelled "follie a deuce" (limitation of reporting). What the available reporting does show is Lee’s public work as a forensic and social psychiatrist who convened colleagues to warn about the psychopathology of political leaders and has attracted both supporters and critics for doing so [1] [2] [3].
1. What the sources actually contain about Bandy X. Lee
The materials supplied describe Dr. Bandy X. Lee as a forensic and social psychiatrist with longstanding academic experience—teaching at Yale for many years and later affiliating with Harvard programs—who edited The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump and led public convenings of mental‑health professionals to warn about the risks posed by a political leader’s mental state [1] [3]. She publishes widely (including Substack and a personal site) and appears frequently in media and podcasts, establishing a public intellectual profile beyond purely clinical or academic work [4] [5] [6].
2. What the sources do not contain: the phrase “follie a deuce”
None of the provided sources contain the exact phrase "follie a deuce" or connect Lee to that spelling or formulation; the reporting snippets make no reference to it, so any claim that Lee used or coined that phrase cannot be substantiated from the supplied material (limitation of reporting). Because the phrase is absent, it cannot be confirmed whether it's a typographical error, an idiosyncratic coinage, a reference to another language expression, or a misattribution; the sources do not clarify this.
3. Context that makes “folie à deux” a plausible point of confusion
The reporting does show Lee organizing groups of mental‑health professionals to make collective judgments about a public figure’s dangerousness and to mobilize political advocacy, which makes confusion with the psychiatric concept “folie à deux” (a term referring to shared delusional belief between people) understandable even if that exact concept isn’t invoked in the supplied texts [2] [3]. Critics and commentators have framed Lee’s work as collective psychiatric judgment applied to politics—Bruce Gilley’s critique, for instance, portrays her as mobilizing experts to declare a political leader mentally unfit—so readers might conflate clinical syndromes of shared pathology with the public, group‑based interventions Lee organized [2].
4. Supporters, critics, and the central dispute in the reporting
The supplied excerpts document both strong supporters and vocal opponents: public intellectuals such as Jeffrey Sachs and Cornel West are quoted defending Lee’s right to speak out about leadership dangers, while legal figures like Alan Dershowitz have attacked specific diagnoses and the propriety of public psychiatric assessments of political figures [7] [8]. This split in the coverage highlights the core debate evident in the sources: whether psychiatrists have an ethical and civic responsibility to publicly warn about leaders, or whether such warnings violate professional norms and risk politicizing psychiatry [7] [2].
5. Bottom line given the reporting available
Based on the supplied reporting, there is no documented instance of Dr. Bandy X. Lee using or being associated with the phrase spelled "follie a deuce"; the available material instead documents her role as a public‑facing psychiatrist who convened colleagues to issue warnings about political leadership and who attracted both high‑profile support and pointed criticism for doing so [1] [2] [3]. Any definitive linkage between Lee and the specific term "follie a deuce" would require sources not included here; absent them, readers should treat that phrasing as unverified and possibly a misspelling or misremembering of other concepts discussed in the literature.