Is Left-Wing Politics Causing Mental Health Problems?

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.