There is growing evidence that the percentage of young Americans experiencing mental health problems is on the rise. And the rise appears to be particularly stark among white women who identify as ‘liberal’ (which basically means ‘Left-wing’). Could Left-wing politics be causing mental health problems? It’s a real possibility.
The tendency for young, white, female liberals to report mental health problems at higher rates than other groups was discovered by political scientist Zach Goldberg. Analysing data from a Pew Research survey carried out during the pandemic, he found that 56% of white, liberal women aged 18–29 had ever been diagnosed with a mental health condition by their doctors – that’s more than half!
Goldberg recently shared some charts (see below) that show exactly how the mental health of different groups of American 12th graders (those aged 17–18) has changed over time. The graphs are based on data from the Monitoring the Future – a repeated survey of young Americans that’s been going since the mid 1970s.
The first chart plots males and females; the second plots male liberals, female liberals, male conservatives and female conservatives; the third plots the difference between males and females, as well as the difference between liberals and conservatives.
Looking at the first chart, both males and females have seen an increase in mental health problems – though the increase is much larger for females. Turing to the second chart, the increase among females is overwhelmingly driven by female liberals. (And the somewhat increase among males is driven by male liberals.)
The third chart confirms that the divergence between liberals and conservatives is actually greater than the divergence between males and females. As of 2020, liberal 12th graders are 17 percentage points more likely to have seen their doctor about mental health problems in the past 12 months.
So what explains these trends? One possibility is that people who had mental health problems to begin with have become less likely to identify as conservative and more likely to identify as liberal. But this is clearly not the case. If it were, the lines for conservatives would go down just as much as the lines for liberals have gone up. But in fact, none of the lines have gone down. There’s been an overall increase in the number of young people with mental health problems.
Is it possible that left-wing ideas themselves are to blame for worsening mental health? That was the argument Jon Haidt and Greg Lukianoff made in their influential 2015 essay ‘The Coddling of the American Mind’.
Of course, they weren’t talking about traditional Left-wing ideas like nationalising companies and giving rights to workers. They were talking about modern Left-wing ideas. Specifically, Haidt and Lukianoff argued that many prescriptions of woke ideology are the exact opposite of what cognitive behavioural therapy recommends for patients with anxiety or depression.
For example, CBT advises patients to avoid catastrophising and emotional reasoning, while encouraging them to ‘face their fears’. By contrast, woke ideology tells young people (especially young women) they should always trust their feelings, even innocuous things like words can harm them, and the best way to deal with sources of anxiety is to avoid them completely.
One might add: telling young people that they may have been born in the ‘wrong body’, or that the world is about to end because of catastrophic climate change, can’t be good for their mental health either.
More research is needed on Haidt and Lukianoff’s ‘reverse-CBT’ hypothesis, but it strikes me as a plausible explanation for the divergence between liberals and conservatives we’ve seen over the last decade.
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The people will see through it
An Italian acquaintance of ours thinks Meloni is a “Fascist”. I’m still waiting to read news reports from Italy of state bully-boys on the streets checking people’s papers, state censorship, mass restrictions of basic freedoms, forced medical treatment. Ah hold on, that was the previous government during “covid”…
Nowadays, Fascist is a gender id acquired by being referred to as Fascists by people who always refer to their political opponents as Fascists. No particular behaviour or support for any particular set of policies is required for that. Oppositon to any policy all good people want to see implemented is enough. And the good people are those to determine who the good and the bad people are.
Exactly
What I find frustrating is that “good” people with otherwise apparently functioning intellect fall for this. When you ask them to define “fascism” or name actions or policies of some hated political leader or group they are unable to. Pathetic.
Traditionally, German citizenship was based on the so-called ius sanguinis also used in other parts of the world: Someone is born as German if his parents are Germans. To this date, that’s stated in article 116 of the German constitution:
(1) Deutscher im Sinne dieses Grundgesetzes ist vorbehaltlich anderweitiger gesetzlicher Regelung, wer die deutsche Staatsangehörigkeit besitzt oder als Flüchtling oder Vertriebener deutscher Volkszugehörigkeit oder als dessen Ehegatte oder Abkömmling in dem Gebiete des Deutschen Reiches nach dem Stande vom 31. Dezember 1937 Aufnahme gefunden hat.
This refers to the rules who’d be considered German in place before 1945 with an addition that Germans expatriated for political reasons between 1933 and 1945 may reacquire German citizenship if they so desire. This was changed during the Schröder led red-green coalition (SPD and Greens) in power around the turn of the century. As Scholz was already a professional SPD politician at that time, he’s obviously aware of this and is just trying to Nazi-paint the people who were opposed to this change of the German constitution at that time for an audience which is young enough that it doesn’t remember this.
This means the real meaning of his statement is If you’re opposed to policies championed and implemtented by SPD and Greens the last time the governed in Germany, prepare for a visit by our secret state police. And he certainly means our, ie the Gestapo (secret state police) controlled by SPD and Greens. These guys are truly ‘democrats’ their political allies from the SED (currently callled Die Linke/ The Left) can be proud of.
Addition: The real name of this secret state police – Verfassungschutz – means secret service tasked with protecting the constitution against its enemies. Functionally, this is closer to the traditional GDR term Staatssicherheit/ Stasi — secret service tasked with protecting that state.
Love to hear from whoever downvoted this as to where RW has gone wrong
Correction: The Schröder-government didn’t really change the constitution but created additional law about granting German citizenship to foreigners without German heritage. The principal beneficaries of this were ethnic turks and their descendants who had come to Germany for work on initiative of earlier SPD governments. This created the paradoxical situation that there’s nowadays a fairy large distinctive ethnic group of people with their own culture and traditions who do not desire to integrate into German society and who’d never refer to themselves as Germans (the term, in its Turkish form of Alman, is actually an insult among members of this group) but who are nevertheless regarded as German by the state.
This renders Scholz’s ranting even less coherent: He’s in favour of certain laws passed under the aegis of his own party and its most important coalition partner (Greens). And these are supposed to be sacrosanct to all others. Different opinions or even real political opposition will not be tolerated, IOW, mere voters must not decide that they prefer something else instead.
Branding patriotic small c conservative voters across the West as “deplorables” by the arrogant Globalists isn’t going to work. Not in the USA; not in the EU and not in the UK.