Aruna Khilanani – the Inmate who took over the Asylum – an Open Letter to Peter Salovey, Ph.D., the 23rd President of Yale University

by Terry A. Hurlbut, ConservativeNewsandViews, ©2021 

(Jun. 13, 2021) — 

To: Peter Salovey, Ph.D., President, Yale University, Woodbridge Hall, New Haven, Connecticut 06520.

From: Terry A. Hurlbut, B.S., M.D., Yale College Class of 1980.

Dear Sir:

I write today to express my outrage over the “Continuing Medical Educational” talk by Aruna Khilanani, M.D., M.A. As you know, that talk took place by Zoom teleconference on 6 April 2021. She titled her talk, “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind.” Incredibly, one Rosemary Serra booked this talk for Grand Rounds at the Yale Child Study Center. Sir, Ms. Serra, as Senior Administrative Assistant, and the faculty of the Psychiatry Department either exploited a very troubled woman or else lent her a platform for a dangerous political manifesto. That manifesto arises out of her paranoid ideation of which I find ample history from a simple Internet engine search.

In the language to which I became accustomed in the course of my training, I find this exercise totally inappropriate. At best, someone exploited a sufferer from chronic post-traumatic stress disorder who presents with paranoid ideation from an unfortunate episode. And at worst someone gave her a platform to start a race war. And what you cannot excuse, is that this happened on your watch.

A glossary

Before I begin, Dr. Salovey, I will share a glossary of terms you might or might not recognize. Your academic background is in social psychology, not in psychiatry or other medical practice. Besides, my readers need to understand these terms to grasp the context of this letter.

• Attending – a physician having admitting privileges at a hospital. The term also applies to any physician who has served on a hospital medical staff for, say, three years. Pathologists, radiologists, and anesthesiologists do not normally admit patients. But after they have their three years in (as a “courtesy physician”), a hospital will still call them “attendings.” And in a teaching hospital, the attendings are the professors. (Teaching hospitals also often credential new attending physicians as part of granting them faculty appointments. This does not happen in community hospitals.)
• Resident – a member of the “house staff” of a teaching hospital. These are the trainees, who have their medical degrees. In most programs, one chief resident in each department gives orders to all other house staff in that department.
• Extern(e) – a senior medical student taking advanced training in patient management but not a member of the house staff. One distinguishes such a person from an intern(e), or a first-year resident.
• Clinical clerk – a junior medical student gaining his/her first exposure to patient management.
• Rounds – the practice of visiting each patient one is following, to check on clinical progress.
• Grand rounds – a lecture for the benefit of medical staff and students.

Terms describing illness

• Symptom – something about which a patient may complain.
• Sign – an anomaly one might measure on physical or laboratory examination.
• Disease – a condition with a clear definition not only of symptoms but of their causes.
• Syndrome – a collection of symptoms that could have any of many causes. One also uses the term to describe symptoms the cause of which even the profession does not know.
• Neurosis – a condition in which the patient knows something is wrong with him/her but doesn’t quite understand what.
• Psychosis – a condition in which the patient doesn’t understand or doesn’t want to understand that something is wrong with his or her thinking. Such a person might divorce himself from reality.
• Insight – the capacity to recognize a psychological problem in one’s own thinking.
• Projection – a symptom in which the patient accuses others of his own faults – literally, “throws off” on others.
• Paranoid ideation – a set of ideas a patient might have that includes an exaggerated sense of the patient’s own importance, intelligence – and persecution.
• Paranoia vera – true paranoia, a psychosis with paranoid ideation as the primary presenting symptom.
• Post traumatic stress disorder – the aftermath of an unusually stressful event.
• Acute – an adjective describing a disease or syndrome with immediate or short-term effect.
• Chronic – an adjective describing a disease or syndrome with long-term effect.

Aruna Khilanani and her unfortunate case history

In discussing the case history of Aruna Khilanani, I do not speak out-of-school. Everything I am about to say is a matter of record. That includes the record of an interview she gave to one Katie Herzog. Ms. Herzog had already written extensively about a disturbing trend toward subordinating medicine to leftist politics.

In her interview, Dr. Khilanani told of a salient episode. For my immediate purpose, I will assume she did not invent this story. According to her, the family member of a patient she followed at the Cornell School of Medicine physically assaulted her. I gather this family member escalated a disagreement about appropriate therapy to the level of personal violence.

Again according to Dr. Khilanani, her preceptors at first asked her what she might have done to provoke the attack. Understand this: I do not repeat not excuse anyone who, disputing the wisdom of medical care for oneself or a member of one’s family, dares settle that dispute on the level of physical violence. But I cannot know the full particulars of this incident. Why not? Because Aruna Khilanani declined to file a formal complaint. When Ms. Herzog asked why not, she said “the more you push back, the more they … keep attacking you.” Dr. Salovey, you know as well as I do that if you don’t complain, no one will investigate. That is simple common sense, and one need not be a “social psychologist” like yourself to understand that.

Other complaints after the fact

Nor does Aruna Khilanani limit her complaint to a description of a violent attack against herself. She alleges that her superiors – presumably the chief resident – assigned her to excessive “Saturday call.” That superior also, according to her, denied her a vacation. Dr. Khilanani raises a question of whether she made a formal request, and whether a colleague received a vacation without that formality. I cannot judge the truth or falsehood of that account. But I can tell you that, in my residency training, I found chief residents and program directors eminently receptive to requests I filed in the proper way.

I have reviewed her interview and the best transcript I could prepare of her remarks (see below). I see an anger-management issue going far beyond one alleged altercation with a patient’s family member. Worse than that, I see a lack of insight or even an outright refusal to exercise it. This becomes more than post-traumatic stress disorder with paranoid ideation as a symptom. Now the differential diagnosis must include paranoia vera. If Aruna Khilanani really believes what she says, then she is a paranoiac and not merely someone with paranoid ideas.

Read the rest here.