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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Once you have understood this, you have understood ‘pandemic!’ ‘the world is on fire!’, nut zero, ‘Blair’s Britain’ and everything:
‘Combining data for the past five years, from 2018 through 2022, allows for a more robust analysis of demographic differences in views about marijuana legalization than is possible from a single poll. Using this aggregate, Gallup finds support for legalization averaged 67% among the general population but varied significantly by subgroup. Conservative, religious and older Americans are the least supportive, while liberal, nonreligious and younger Americans are the most supportive.
Specifically, subgroups whose support for legalization exceeds the national average by 10 or more percentage points include those with no religious preference (89%), self-identified liberals (84%), Democrats (81%)’
‘Marijuana Views Linked to Ideology, Religiosity, Age’ Nov. 2022
‘….the concentration of THC in cannabis has increased significantly over time meaning that cannabis used today is typically much stronger than previously.’
‘…people who use high potency cannabis are more likely to experience addiction than those using low potency products. It also suggests that people using high potency cannabis are more likely to experience a psychotic disorder, such as schizophrenia.’
‘High-strength cannabis linked to addiction and mental health problems’ July 2022
Cannabis addiction is a very real phenomenon[*] but this has nothing to do with the perennial chestnut of the new superhigh potency weed. I’ve already read these stories more than 20 years ago. But then, that’s just another instance of participiants of the so-called culture wars on all two sides being equally corrupt and equally willing to use bad fabrications to further thier dubious causes.
[*] If you’re used to consuming Cannabis-products all day, suddenly stopping this will result in a very miserable feeling one will usually desire to end as soon as possible. This lasts for about two weeks and needs a conscious effort to overcome. Before I moved to England, I gave my last piece of hashish as present to someone (much thanked for in the falsely cozy ways of this subculture) because I had grown intellectually tired of this (and of the people associated with it). That wasn’t exactly pleasant for about half a month but I like my non-stoned self better.
You are entitled, of course, to your own opinion.
Others will base theirs on the evidence:
‘This study finds strong evidence of an association between cannabis use disorder (CUD) and schizophrenia among both males and females, and the magnitude of this association appears to be consistently larger among males than females, especially among those aged 16–25. Importantly, 15% of cases of schizophrenia in males may be preventable if CUD was avoided. Although CUD is not responsible for most schizophrenia cases in Denmark, it appears to contribute to a non-negligible and steadily increasing proportion over the past five decades. In young males (21–30 years, possibly up to 40), the proportion may even be as high as 25–30%. There are global increases in legalization of nonmedical use of cannabis, increases in THC content of cannabis and in total THC doses consumed (Caulkins, Pardo, & Kilmer,) increases in the prevalence of cannabis use and CUD, and decrease in public perception of harm from cannabis use (Chiu, Hall, Chan, Hides, & Leung,)
Alongside the increasing evidence that CUD is a modifiable risk factor for schizophrenia, our findings underscore the importance of evidence-based strategies to regulate cannabis use and to effectively prevent, screen for, and treat CUD as well as schizophrenia.’
Association between cannabis use disorder and schizophrenia….May 2023
Addicts don’t like to hear the truth.
You are hereby awarded the medal for the idiot who’d certainly be posting this. It’s truly deserved. I was actually reluctant to publish the comment just because one of your species was going to react in exactly this way to it. But since it’s widely claimed and believed that cannabis is actually not addictive, I thought pointing out that it definitely is was worthwhile.
PS: You’ve also crossed into illegal territory here by making factually wrong statements about me I could easily disprove weren’t you hiding your name.
Your text has absolutely no relation to my comment which was about two things
1) The wrong myth of cannabis not being addictive.
2) The eternal superweed hoax.
As I have mentioned before I have a few mental problems from the Army. After my wife died I fell apart and spent 20 years in both a bottle and smoking industrial quantities of ‘blow’. I am clear of both after finally getting some help, other than the offered prescription ‘zombie’ drugs. NHS Veterans (Wales) were marvellous in helping me understand and work through my problems although it was brutal. I did not start smoking it until I was in my mid forties and I think that this makes a big difference, my brain is fully formed and I was, ostensibly, an adult. I often wonder if the age at which these others started is ever taken into account, or if it is just monstered to fit a position without reference to the still growing brains of the young. Alcohol and other drugs do affect the development of the immature mind, as is well known. Including abuse by a parent while pregnant (Greta Thunberg, allegedly) causing FASD.
You are clearly too lazy to have read the reference, or even the brief quotes from it, thereby undermining your own protestations.
Bon voyage!
It’s bloody well causing me mental health problems having to listen to all their shyte!
Same here, I keep getting the great urge to go and biet da schidt out of something that really deserves it. Which is causing mental conflict with the part that says that this is not rational. Also with all this safety baggage that is toted these days, why has no one been done for causing harm to others by their actions, as indicated within the introduction of the H&S at work act 1974, from which all the ails of today are derived.
In order to maintain most woke ideological religious tenets, you must hold multiple counter factual lies and inconsistencies in your mind. Moreover one must constantly change these ideas once they are proven false without using the change of information as a basis for reevaluating your information sources and your peer group networks.
To continuously lie to yourself requires a lot of emotional energy which the woke cult tries to keep fired up through media dog whistles. However the right wingers are also caught up in these hysterical stories and suffer as a consequence. For them, it’s constantly seeing lies endorsed by the left and ratified by the news and media never seeming to improve and always leading to more disasters. Then the ever present impending fear that it’s all going to hell and there’s nothing we can do about it, including banging away at our cultist lefty friends and family in the vain hope they will “wake up” and have their heads deeply buried in the sand.
Its a war on all our minds, woke or awake.
56% of white, liberal women aged 18–29 had ever been diagnosed with a mental health condition by their doctors
Old joke, but has to be made here: Didn’t you just write that they were woke liberals?
This sort of Left Wing Politics is a mental health problem. Think running around with leaky facemasks to protect oneself against submicroscopic invisible enemies lurking everywhere, believing that a weather beast god will one day kill us all and that some demonic superhuman entity places human souls in wrong bodies solely to torment them.
Doesn’t strike me as particularly sane and balanced.
Holding multiple contradictory opinions at the same time can’t be good for one’s mental health either.
On a related topic I heard that a BBC reporter at a presser for the Women’s football asked a Moroccan player how many lesbians where in the team. Completely ignorant of the fact that not every country is as tolerant of that sort of thing as Britain – and despite the same BBC regularly contributing to the argument that Britain is a sexist, homophobic hell-hole of oppression.
And there was me thinking they were referring to trans women who had not changed their sexual preferences once they had transitioned.
No need for an explanation or question really. Being woke is an identity relationship (as in algebraic identity) with being mentally ill. It requires devotion to an ideology beyond reason and elevation of a victim mentality over healthy self sufficiency. It has taken over from traditional left wing politics. Plus as Jordan Peterson points out, as the latest research shows, it is also accompanied by a big dollop of psychopathy.
I have always thought that supporting left wing politics was a mental condition, particularly of young people. Most tend to grow out of it as they grow up and assume the responsibilities of adult life.
One does not need to look far at all in Clown World for examples of mentally ill people trying to normalize their behaviour. I’m pretty sure adults identifying as babies would qualify. Eat your heart out Damian Hirst;
https://twitter.com/OliLondonTV/status/1683464633527549952
https://twitter.com/_The_Bayou_Boy/status/1683112626664898560
I think you will find it’s mental health problems causing the left wing politics
Just what I was going to say!
“Could Left-wing politics be causing mental health problems?”
What?!! Perhaps Left-wing politics is the mental illness. Prolonged efforts of a person (or the group) to keep reality outside of their head is not conducive to good mental health.
“Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.”
Thomas Sowell
It is a very small number of people who give a monkey’s about these trendy ideas. I think that even in hotbed USA it was just eight percent. The whole thing is a psy op to convince you that these are the most important issues whilst they fleece you dry.
A small proportion will have genuine mental health problems, for the rest it’s a trend, just another bandwagon to jump on or a label that’s a useful tool for getting out of anything they don’t want to do.
It could also be that this is the mollycoddled generation who have been raised to be perpetually offended and taught that the world is a scary place. These young adults have never known the freedom of spending long summer days out with friends with no parental supervision, sorting out their own differences and entertaining themselves. Instead, their lives have been micromanaged by over anxious parents, they’ve been picked up and dropped off everywhere, run crying to the nearest adult if another child called them a name and won prizes for failing because ‘everyone’s a winner’. Now they’re adults they don’t have a clue how to operate in the real world and peddle all this woke crap to try and make it all a bit less scary with the ‘be kind’ message and such like.
Ofcourse when you believe things that are not true you get yourself into a whole lot trouble. Once you think capitalism is evil when infact it has brought billions out of miserable poverty then right away your world view that does not match what is actually happening in the real world will cause you some anxiety. Once you believe that humanity will be wiped out by a little trace gas that makes you glue yourself to the street then perhaps it is long past the time you saw a shrink. etc etc all the way down the list of absurd Liberal Progressive anti human policies.
You don’t have to be a nutter to espouse left wing ideas, but it certainly helps