The Libs Are Not Alright

Authored by Dante Moretti via American Mind.org,

Political fearmongering has real psychological consequences...

In the wake of Donald Trump’s crushing victory over Vice President Kamala Harris, social media has been flooded with videos of apartment- or vehicle-bound neurotics screaming, banging pots and pans in sheer disbelief, packing their belongings, or generally convulsing as if Kristallnacht were upon us. The American public has been introduced to the 4B movement, in which liberal women appropriate a South Korean sex strike because justice.

To be sure, social media is at best a caricature of real life. Only the most dramatic individuals will shave their heads for “reproductive rights” (read: for likes), but most people do not express themselves in quite such a hyperbolic register. That said, in this case the memes are imitating real life. Not every ex-Kamala voter is experiencing a full-scale breakdown. But judging based on my own clinical observations as a practicing therapist, I think it may well be true that a significant number of young American leftists are going through a collective mental health crisis.

I speak from some experience, having spent multiple hours per day over the past few weeks hearing from clients about the damage inflicted upon their psyches “by the Trump win.” This is their account of things. My own opinion, however, is that someone has subjected these kids to psychic trauma. But it wasn’t Donald Trump.

First Things

I usually begin each appointment by reminding clients of our previous appointment, whereupon the client usually picks up where he or she left off, telling me about personal struggles, generational dynamics, or relationship problems. But since Trump’s victory, a startling number of clients have simply pivoted to another subject entirely. Usually I hear some variation of “I just can’t. I just can’t,” before I am told, with some incredulity that it needs saying, that it is impossible to focus on anything other than THE ELECTION.

When, after listening to a client’s political fears, I gently suggest that we should now get back to discussing his husband’s death, cocaine use, crushing panic while driving, infidelity, or what have you, I am waved off as if we needed a full clinical hour to talk about Trump, WW3, reproductive rights, or a future daughter’s reproductive rights. Maybe the most jarring comment I heard was from a client who expressed relief that a close relative had already died and thus escaped “this sh*t that’s about to go down.” 

One truism I’ve observed in my practice is: “you love what you pay attention to.” I am not saying that my clients spend $180 to talk about the election because they don’t care about their addiction, spouses, etc. But I am saying that they are choosing to prioritize, and therefore nourish, their hatred for Trump. This of course increases their distress, which increases their hatred. This is not a vicious cycle they all just stumbled into by unfortunate happenstance. They were taught incessantly—by friends, by online forums, by figures they trust in the media—that Trump trumps all.

Spiraling Out

Practitioners of what’s called positive psychology will often talk in terms of clients’ tendency to fixate on either an external or an internal locus of control. Different individuals will either instinctually take responsibility for problems that arise, or defer responsibility to another person, system, or institution. A teenage boy who gets caught with weed, if his natural locus of control is internal, will admit fault and responsibility even if everyone else on the soccer team tried it at the party. A boy whose natural inclination is external will cite peer pressure, or insist that his friends’ parents said it was fine. Although one type of locus isn’t necessarily better than the other, the external locus of control does tend to foster victimhood. Often it needs to be counterbalanced by inward focus in order to facilitate agency and improvement. Taking radical responsibility for one’s issues is a key engine of change.

I have been working with some of my clients for quite some time now, and many have gradually learned to shift their locus of control inward. This has aided them in their mental health pursuits. But one common trait I have noticed amongst my Trump-focused clients is that, when the Orange Man comes up, they dart instantly back to an external locus of control. After the election, many of them have taken notable steps backward in our work together. One client even reverted to a cocaine habit after three months of sobriety because “What’s the point now?”

Another client who struggles with depression reported just sitting in bed to “rot” for two days straight. Others have threatened to cut off their parents because they don’t know how they can possibly have another conversation with family members who voted for Trump. These clients are spiraling back out to an external locus of control.

The tragic element in all these cases is that these fragile individuals have been violently interrupted in their healing progress by a completely imaginary evil, projected in Hitler-moustachioed IMAX across the pages of The New Republic, blared from the anchor’s desk on CNN, and generally beaten into the heads of everyone in their immediate circle of trust. And though I personally make a principle of never sharing my political beliefs, some therapists actually encourage their clients’ persecution complexes by adopting an overtly ideological approach, attributing trauma to “systems” of racism, sexism, or homophobia. The effects of this are as you would expect. It is the opposite of helpful.

The Stanford- and Harvard-trained psychiatrist Dr. Paul Conti has qualified what exactly, good mental health means. According to Dr. Conti, someone who exemplifies good mental health, and therefore someone who can be considered “well-adjusted,” cultivates an attitude of gratitude and a feeling of personal autonomy. Keeping this definition in mind, one does not need to be a trained psychotherapist to understand how mental health has deteriorated so grievously in the past 20 or so years, especially among those who lean Left.

When parents, teachers, university professors, and statesmen espouse a rhetoric of ingratitude and dependence, it is no wonder why much of the public suffer from anxiety, depression, and compulsion. Of course, we will laugh at the libs of TikTok shaving their heads and screaming in their cars. But we have to realize this is not the worst of it. If anything, those who engage in such spectacles may have more promise, given that they are more than likely to be opportunistic actors who abandon their political ideas as lightly as they take them up. But we should not laugh at those who break their sobriety, or plunge into isolation because of the Trump victory. They are truly sick, and ideological bad actors have preyed off their desperation for personal clout, terrorizing them with confected fears and then discarding them to suffer the psychological consequences.

There’s a mental health crisis in this country—on this we can all agree. But the peddlers of Trump Derangement Syndrome don’t seem to care that their cynical, apocalyptic politics bear no small part of the blame.