Sickness to Socialism: Leftists Are More Likely to Have Mental Problems, Survey Shows - "Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder isn’t just a book by radio host Michael Savage, it turns out. It’s also a reality, according to a new survey showing that people identifying as left-wing are more likely than other ideologists to have been diagnosed with mental illness. Conducted by science blog Slate Star Codex and involving 8,000 respondents, the “results show that people who occupy the farther left end of the political spectrum are more likely to have been ‘formally diagnosed with depression, borderline personality disorder, bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia’”... “In addition, the results show that the highest percentage of respondents (38%) who admit being diagnosed with forms of mental illness also identify politically as Marxists,” Summit continues. “In comparison, just 12.1% of conservatives say they have been diagnosed with a mental disorder”... This just accords with previous findings, WND.com reminds us. For example, in “an extensive series of surveys involving more than 4,000 interviews conducted over the course of four years, Gallup pollsters in 2007 reported that Republicans had ‘significantly’ better mental health than Democrats, with Independents ranking in-between the two parties,” the site relates. “‘One could be quick to assume,’ said Gallup’s analysis, ‘that these differences [in mental health] are based on the underlying demographic and socioeconomic patterns related to party identification in America today,’ noting that ‘men, those with higher incomes, those with higher education levels, and whites are more likely than others to report excellent mental health. Some of these patterns describe characteristics of Republicans, of course,’” WND also tells us. (Note that, today, Democrats actually have higher incomes.) “However, Gallup revealed, ‘an analysis of the relationship between party identification and self-reported excellent mental health within various categories of age, gender, church attendance, income, education, and other variables shows that the basic pattern persists regardless of these characteristics,’” WND continued. “‘In other words, party identification appears to have an independent effect on mental health even when each of these is controlled for.’” Moreover, “a 2013 SurveyMonkey study commissioned by left-leaning website BuzzFeed News found that Democrats suffered mental illness notably more than Republicans in almost every category,” WND further informs. There also was a 2004 study that analyzed the voting preferences of mentally ill outpatients in Mannheim, Germany, finding that 78 percent of them preferred left-wing parties; only 56 percent did among the city’s general population. Even more striking, a 2007 analysis of General Social Survey (a major study) data found that while only 6.2 percent of people in the “conservative” category suffered from a “mental illness,” 17.9 percent of those in the “liberal” category did... What’s called “leftism” is actually not an ideology but a process of entropic change, of moral decay — and many of what we call “mental disorders” (not all, of course) are actually a result of moral dysfunction. Common-sense psychologist John Rosemond alluded to this years ago, lamenting (for instance) that while generations ago people viewed childhood misbehavior as a moral problem, now they too often consider it a psychological problem. (This mentality’s general application is why most everything formerly considered a sin is now diagnosed as a disease or condition of the brain.) Examples are “Oppositional Defiant Disorder” and “Sibling Rivalry Disorder.”... Every kid I encountered who’d been “ADHD” diagnosed (back then it was just “ADD”) came from a liberal home. In contrast, the best-behaved children generally had three commonalities: politically conservative parents; a church life active to some degree; and a stay-at-home mother — or at least one usually home when the child is (these factors correlate, of course). Moreover, the “ADHD” kids didn’t exhibit any of their “symptoms” when in my charge because I enforced discipline; they knew misbehavior brought consequences. So unless someone believes the children could somehow decide to not be “sick” when in my proximity, it’s clear what was going on."
Meme - "Mean days of poor mental health last 30 days
*clear pattern across all political orientations of women having worse mental health, and clear dose-response effect from extremely liberal to slightly liberal to moderate to extremely conservative, where the more liberal one is the worse one's mental health is*
Social justice fight can take mental health toll on activists - "When 23-year-old MarShawn McCarrel II took his life outside the Ohio Statehouse in February 2016, social-justice activists who had fought with him were devastated... Earlier this year, they were rocked again by the suicide death of another colleague, 28-year-old Amber Evans, whose body was found in the Scioto River... This time, the loss came after the crushing November defeat of Issue 1, a proposed amendment to the state constitution intended to reduce Ohio’s inmate population by redirecting nonviolent drug offenders from prison into treatment. The losses caused many to stop in their tracks, said Amanda Hoyt, 45, of Clintonville, who had campaigned relentlessly alongside Evans for the initiative. Hoyt said she suffered a breakdown months before the election after discovering that the language to be used on the ballot was unfavorable to Issue 1 proponents. She suffered panic attacks for 12 days and could not leave her bed... Hoyt, Alsaada and fellow advocate Kevin O’Donnell talked with The Dispatch about the mental toll on those engaged in social justice activism. They spoke, sometimes through tears, about 60-hour workweeks, encountering pervasive and persistent racism and, in retrospect, expecting too much of others who worked beside them. Evans had dedicated nearly every fiber of her being to social justice, her friends and coworkers said. Along with advocating for Issue 1, she had lobbied against the use of police officers in schools and protested police use of force, all the while mentoring high school students and tutoring dropouts working to earn their diplomas... Stressors in the social justice movement include butting heads with massive, long-established systems, the need to constantly be vigilant for the black community and carrying past traumas... Many, she said, come to social justice work having suffered racism, violence, poverty or some other trauma. And because such movements thrive on relationships and sharing, advocates dig up difficult memories and listen to the stories of others, creating new layers of trauma... With odds stacked against them, the realistic chances of success may be slim and, if they are making personal sacrifices for the work, failure can be painful, he said. Focusing on the mission, many may think everything else is unimportant, Spiegel added, and that what they are suffering pales in comparison with the suffering of people they are fighting for, so there are no limits."
Grievance mongering is bad for health. And/or people who are never happy take it out on the world
These are the same people who go on about "white fragility"
Why are young liberals so depressed? - "Social media is good at generating polarization, and some of the left-inflected pushback has essentially argued that maybe teens aren’t depressed because of phones but because, in Taylor Lorenz’s words, “we’re living in a late stage capitalist hellscape during an ongoing deadly pandemic w record wealth inequality, 0 social safety net/job security, as climate change cooks the world.” Noah Smith and Eric Levitz both wrote good articles questioning the veracity of that doomer narrative... I also don’t believe that liberal boys are experiencing more depression than conservative girls because they are disproportionately hung up on Instagram-induced body image issues — I think there’s also something specific to politics going on. Some of it might be selection effect, with progressive politics becoming a more congenial home for people who are miserable. But I think some of it is poor behavior by adult progressives, many of whom now valorize depressive affect as a sign of political commitment. The thing about depression, though, is that it’s bad. Separate from the Smith/Levitz project of arguing about recent political trends, I think we need some kind of society-level cognitive behavioral therapy to convince people that whatever it is they are worried about, depression is not the answer. Because it never is... The catalog of woes offered in the paper sounds less to me like a causal explanation of why progressive teens have more depressive affect than it does like listening to a depressed liberal give an account of recent American politics. Note for example the negative framing of the fact that progressives have used their agenda-setting power to make structural racism, pervasive sexism, and rampant socioeconomic inequality into unavoidable features of political discourse. One could instead say this is what the path to victory looks like — progressive activists and intellectuals have succeeded in getting more people to pay attention to what they think are the most important problems. Mentally processing ambiguous events with a negative spin is just what depression is. And while the finding that liberals are disproportionately likely to do it is interesting and important, it’s not sound practice to celebrate that or tell them that they are right to do it... progressive institutional leaders have specifically taught young progressives that catastrophizing is a good way to get what they want... just because some utterance is subjectively distressing doesn’t mean it was bad for you to hear it. As someone who takes all kinds of crap from people all day every day, the stuff that causes me the most subjective anguish is the valid criticism. It’s relatively easy to brush off the haters, anti-semites, and idiots; it’s correct criticism that’s painful. The truth hurts, as they say... There’s a sense that the way to show you’re truly outraged about police misconduct is to proclaim police reform to be a hopeless failure. Or that the way to show you’re truly committed to decarbonization is to ignore good news about climate change. And almost nobody seems to want to talk about how Obama-era tax and spending policies plus the strong Biden labor market have partially reversed the rise in inequality that mostly occurred way back in the 1980s and 1990s. What I find remarkable about this is that if you look at the people who’ve led effective movements for social change, they never come close to cultivating this kind of doomer mindset. Whether you’re talking about “sí se puede,” “there is power in a union,” “the people united will never be defeated” or anything else, sloganeers present an exaggerated sense of optimism just the way good coaches do. Good math teachers and good personal trainers are the same — they express confidence that you are capable of more than you think to try to motivate you to do as well as you really can... Telling people their depressive affect represents their superior sensitivity or commitment to justice is just an invitation to a downward spiral."
Liberals are very proud of mental illness, so
i/o on X - "12th-grade liberals (both boys and girls ) are considerably more likely to agree that they "don't have much to be proud of" and "can't do anything right" than 12th-grade conservatives."
The politics of depression: Diverging trends in internalizing symptoms among US adolescents by political beliefs - "Depressive affect (DA) scores increased for all adolescents after 2010, but increases were most pronounced for female liberal adolescents (b for interaction = 0.17, 95% CI: 0.01, 0.32), and scores were highest overall for female liberal adolescents with low parental education (Mean DA 2010: 2.02, SD 0.81/2018: 2.75, SD 0.92). Findings were consistent across multiple internalizing symptoms outcomes."
Grievance mongering is a self-fulfilling prophecy and liberalism is bad for mental health
i/o on X - "Pew Research found that liberal women are about 10 times more likely to have been diagnosed with a mental health condition by age 30 than conservative and moderate men have been by age 65, and about 2.5 times more likely than conservative women in their same age cohort."
Gad Saad on X - "Liberalism in its current form is a parasitic set of ideas, hence the greater incidence of mental illness. Ideological neuro-parasitism robs you of reason, logic joy, and individual dignity."
People who have 'woke' opinions are more likely to be depressed and anxious, study suggests - "being on the political left had a higher association with lower mental well-being than having a high 'social justice score.' Oskari Lahtinen, lead study author and senior researcher at the INVEST Research Glagship Centre at the University of Turku in Finland, said that while wokeism started in America, it had now been imported to almost all Western countries... They also had the lowest happiness scores."
Yet more evidence that liberals are unhappy and have mental health problems. The fact that political self-identification had a stronger association with them than issue by issue views is telling
Opinion | Don’t Let Politics Cloud Your View of What’s Going On With Teens and Depression - The New York Times - "while girls are more likely to be depressed than boys, the study, by a group of epidemiologists at Columbia, showed that liberal boys had higher rates of depression than conservative girls... It’s long been known that liberals tend to be more depressed than conservatives, which you can interpret as either a cause or an effect of their unhappiness with the status quo. But innate factors couldn’t explain why, among the 12th graders the study examined, the gap in depressive symptoms between liberals and conservatives appeared to be growing. Nor could those factors explain why, after several years in which liberal girls and liberal boys endured roughly equal rates of depression, girls who identified as liberal had started having a much harder time... The notion that Trump’s America was a psychologically unhealthy place for young women resonated with me, and I considered writing about it. But as I looked closer at the data, I saw that the inflection point for liberal adolescent depression wasn’t 2016, but around 2012. That was the year of the devastating Sandy Hook mass shooting, but it was not otherwise a time of liberal political despair. Barack Obama was re-elected in 2012. In 2013, the Supreme Court extended gay marriage rights. It was hard to draw a direct link between that period’s political events and teenage depression, which in 2012 started an increase that has continued, unabated, until today... liberal teenagers spent more time on social media than their conservative peers. Girls also use social media more than boys do, though boys tend to spend more time on screens, largely because of video games. Twenge pointed out that “The Politics of Depression” found increases not just in depression but also in loneliness among liberal teenage girls. “Why would they feel lonely because of the state of politics?” she asked... “In aggregate, Covid barely moved the needle,” said Haidt. “The incredibly rapid rise of mental illness since 2012 basically just charged on almost unaffected.”... sexual assault and political backsliding can’t be the whole story behind soaring rates of adolescent anguish. Sexual violence has been consistently bad in America: According to the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, in 2011, 12 percent of girls reported that they’d been forced to have sex, only two points fewer than in 2021. American politics didn’t take a severe right turn until 2016... 55 studies in their review found a significant correlation between time spent on social media and mood disorders, compared with 11 that found little or no correlation. Other research suggests a causal relationship. A 2022 study in The American Economic Review, for example, took advantage of the fact that Facebook rolled out on different college campuses at different times. “The introduction of Facebook at a college had a negative impact on student mental health,” it found, presenting evidence that Facebook fostered “unfavorable social comparisons.”... unlike hysteria over rock music, concern about the psychological effects of social media is something many young people share. “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression,” said internal Facebook research leaked by the whistle-blower Frances Haugen in 2021. “This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.” The idea that unaccountable corporate behemoths are harming kids with their products shouldn’t be a hard one for liberals to accept, even if figures like Hawley believe it as well. I’m not sure if banning social media for young people is the right way to start fixing the psychic catastrophe engulfing so many kids. But we’re not going to find any fix at all if we simply start with our political priors and work backward."
Left wingers view everything as a way to push their agenda, so the prescription is always the same (e.g. more feminism as a way to increase fertility, even though the evidence is feminism reduces fertility).
The Despair of Young Liberal Women - "Liberals consistently report lower levels of personal satisfaction than conservatives... The deficit in life satisfaction among liberals has a lot to do with lifestyle decisions... Young women are shedding their religious attachments at a rapid clip as well, and the marriage gap between liberals and conservatives is widest among younger women. Only 22 percent of young women are married. Still, the slow-moving shifts in marriage patterns and religious participation are inadequate explanations for the sudden rise in despair. Further, these trends can’t explain why young women appear most affected. Young liberal men face the same deficit when it comes to church and family, and they have weaker friendship networks than women as well. One recent event was especially significant for young liberal women: #MeToo. Even as public interest in the #MeToo movement recedes, its influence remains considerable. In recent interviews with young women, we found that the #MeToo movement was incredibly salient—for many, it was a transformative experience that informed their views on relationships, sexism, and gender equality... young liberal women expressed the greatest feelings of discontent with the treatment of women in the US... It’s not only that young women are uniquely dissatisfied with the current state of gender equality; these views are closely connected to how they think about their own lives. Pessimism about the treatment of women in society is closely connected to negative feelings about the direction of their own lives. Young liberal women who are unhappy about the way women are treated feel much more pessimistic. This connection is not evident among young conservative women or older women... The majority of older liberals identify as white, non-Hispanic Christians, but vanishingly few young liberals do. Most importantly, young liberal women today are much more likely to identify as LGBT. Analysis of 2022 Gallup surveys shows that nearly four in ten (38 percent) young liberal women identify as LGBT, roughly ten times the number among older liberals."
Conservatives Report Greater Meaning in Life than Liberals - "This finding remained significant after adjusting for religiosity and was usually stronger than the relationships involving other well-being measures. Finally, meaning in life was more closely related to social conservatism than economic conservatism."