Which specific psychiatrists signed the 2017 and 2024 open letters about Trump, and what are their credentials?
Executive summary
Two distinct waves of public warnings by mental-health professionals about Donald Trump—first in 2017 and again in 2024—are documented in the sources, but the reportage does not provide a complete roster of every psychiatrist who signed either statement; available articles name a handful of prominent clinicians and summarize the composition of the 2024 letter’s signers as a broad mix of mental‑health professionals rather than a catalog of psychiatrists [1] [2] [3].
1. The 2017 open letter: who is named and what they’ve done
The 2017 open letter warning that Trump’s mental state “makes him incapable of serving safely as president” included named psychiatrists such as Lance Dodes, described as a retired assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and Joseph Schachter, who has held a senior position in the International Psychoanalytic Association, and the campaign was associated with clinicians organized around Bandy Lee, an assistant clinical professor in Yale’s psychiatry department who also edited a 2017 book gathering assessments from 27 psychiatrists and mental‑health experts [1] [4] [5].
2. The 2017 roster: partial lists and limits of public reporting
Contemporary coverage and later summaries identify several leaders and contributors—Bandy Lee as an organizer and editor, and contributors collected in The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump—but mainstream articles cited here do not publish an exhaustive, line‑by‑line list of all psychiatrists who signed the February 2017 open letter, so a precise, source‑verified roster of every psychiatrist signatory from that letter cannot be compiled from the provided reporting [5] [1].
3. The 2024 open letter: composition, lead voices, and credential ambiguity
The 2024 full‑page advertisement and open letter organized in connection with George Conway’s Anti‑Psychopath PAC reported more than 230 mental‑health professionals signing, and news stories note the lead conveners included clinical psychologists such as John Gartner rather than specifically naming a discrete roster of psychiatrists; outlets emphasize that signatories ranged from university lecturers to psychotherapists, nurse practitioners and social workers, indicating the group was multidisciplinary and that many signers were not psychiatrists by training [3] [2] [6].
4. What the sources say about credentials and professional ethics
Reporting repeatedly highlights tensions over the American Psychiatric Association’s Goldwater Rule, which cautions psychiatrists against diagnosing public figures without personal examination, and both 2017 and 2024 coverage note signers’ efforts to justify public statements by citing observable behavior or by invoking a “duty to warn”; the sources therefore document the signers’ claimed credentials in several cases (Harvard, Yale, leadership in psychoanalytic organizations) but also show the 2024 letter included many non‑psychiatrists, complicating any attempt to extract a list limited to board‑certified psychiatrists [1] [4] [2].
5. Bottom line and reporting gaps
From the materials provided, specific named psychiatrists who can be cited with credentials include Lance Dodes (retired Harvard Medical School assistant clinical professor of psychiatry) and Joseph Schachter (senior role in the International Psychoanalytic Association), and Bandy Lee is identified as an assistant clinical professor in Yale’s psychiatry department and the organizer/editor of a 2017 book compiling psychiatric assessments—all verifiable in the cited pieces—but the 2017 and especially the 2024 open letters involved many signers and the reporting here does not furnish a complete, source‑verified list of every psychiatrist signer or of each signer’s formal medical credentials, so any comprehensive roster would require consulting the original published letters or signatory lists beyond these sources [1] [4] [5] [3] [2].