As a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, I have seen firsthand the shift you describe. That's why in the summer of 2020, I moved away from providing individual psychotherapy sessions to conducting psychoeducation webinars. Now I teach large groups of people how to regulate their emotions, tolerate distress, mitigate conflict, manage stress, avoid burnout, get a good night's sleep, and many other necessary strategies and tools. It is rewarding work and I thoroughly enjoy doing it.
Although promising liberation, social justice distorts complex reality into simple clarity that disempowers. I know cuz I took on the guilty white male role during my PhD courses (to test it after years of opposing it on many grounds), and I’m still recovering from my subsequent mental health decline from 2020-22. It seriously sucks. Being assigned guilt cost me my sense of self-efficacy and agency. I don’t recommend it.
Me too. FIRE and Heterodox Academy have helped. But willingly living it in academia among its adherents allowed me to document the experience, to know for myself. At least, I can better instruct my writing students of the limitations of intersectionality, social justice, CRT, etc.
Having done that experiment, you should write about it. Possibly with a co-writer or healthcare professional so it doesn’t suck you back in. Ironically I grew up codependent and learned all these things (cognitive distortions) the hard way and married a dry drunk alcoholic. It took me 12 years to unravel all of that same stuff in Al-Anon, a framework for good mental health.
Good for you! 👍 If you do decide to write a book let us here know; I would be interested in buying it. 👍
Glad you were able to unravel the cognitive distortions you faced. Project Luminas works as my first draft of sorts for coming to terms with the ideology. I’ll certainly update you should it materialize as a book!
How about the word, "Blessed." I was blessed to have stable, caring, educated parents. It's something to be grateful for, not to feel guilty about. Life is not a zero sum game. I am happy when I see the way others are blessed as well. When we look a little deeper, we see we all have blessings to appreciate and challenges to cope with and they are really hard to quantify and qualify. I've seen this working with both incarcerated individuals and CEO's and diplomats.
Acknowledge privileges result from complex individual choices more than an oppressive system. Completely dissociate privilege from guilt. Privilege is a function of complex individual, familial, cultural, class, and historical causes. Guilt results from transgressing a rule or law. DEI guilt reduces individual variance to an arbitrary yet universalized and essentialized characteristic: skin color. Hence minority partisan political roles based on racial allegiance and severe guilt when a freethinking individual transgresses prescribed roles: skin-folk should be kin-folk. Leading with DEI guilt means distorting individuals’ present complex present self via past group racial history. Such racial guilt to me is subtractive resentment not generative empowerment that acknowledges all the positive privilege that exists in people’s lives.
Everyone has the great privilege of just being alive, of having been born. Privilege has been redefined or at least weaponized to herd people like cattle to only one conclusion in all circumstances; namely that one’s privilege is an immutable trait that requires them to serve the interests of others without a thought for themselves (ever.) Having come from codependency I can tell you firsthand that is demoralizing and unhealthy. There is no way, the way they want you to conclude, to use “Privilege” in this way. The alternative is something that, ironically, our American culture previously tried to instill in people - treat others as you wish to be treated. The Golden Rule. Everyone has advantages and disadvantages, teach people how to be helpful without being used. The current system is usery at best, deliberate destruction of others at worst.
I don't think you can. Being designated as "privileged" is a judgement on the party. The judgement is highly negative and, in today's environment, equates them with an "oppressor."
RECOMMENDATION: Change your way of thinking about others. Claiming someone is "privileged" amounts to a type of hate speech. God forbid you do that.
Thank you, Sol! It is immensely rewarding. Participants express gratitude for the reminder or encouragement to practice better self-care. I really enjoy hearing from people following the webinar who tell me stories about how applying the strategies I teach improved their sleep, relationship, mental well-being, confidence, and/or boundary setting. I recently published a book that outlines what I teach using myself as the example client - The Third Space: A Nonconformist's Guide to the Universe (on Amazon). Zander
One potential problem with this analysis: What if liberals are not more likely than conservatives to suffer from mental health problems, but are more likely to report them? If conservatives are more repressed than liberals, they might suffer from depression but be less likely to admit it and seek help. Or they might seek treatments (such as turning to religion) that allow them to deal with problems without admitting to them.
Another potential problem with this analysis: What if this correlation, if real, is causation in the other direction? In other words, what if liberalism does not cause mental illness, but people with mental illness are more likely to be liberal because their own problems cause them to have more empathy for the suffering of others?
I strongly lean toward the reverse causality story. That is, being emotionally fragile makes you attracted to social justice extremism. Consider the sexually nonbinaries. If you're old-fashioned like me and think that non-binary is a symptom of poor mental health, then it is not the ideology causing their emotional fragility. It is the other way around.
Another possible pathway: people start with better mental health when they enter these social justice movements but their mental health deteriorates as they spend more time being exposed to pessimistic views and cognitive distortions of their new online and in-person communities. They may have been attracted to these movements for a variety of non-fragile reasons - healthy compassion, a genuine desire to do good, or normal adolescent/young adult idealism and desire to explore new ideas - but their mental health is brought down over time. Young women are especially vulnerable to "catching" the negative moods of those around them.
Claiming to have psychiatric conditions such as PTSD, Dissociative Identity Disorder, ADHD, and various abnormal "genders" is very popular among white females in my ultra liberal city. Not only are these young women reporting more psychiatric symptoms than other people do, they are "faking bad" mental health conditions.
Citation needed that leftism = “empathy for others.” Yes, I am aware that leftism puts “empathy” on the letterhead but that doesn’t mean it’s genuine; I posit that it’s just branding. In my anecdotal experience the supposed empathy of leftists is generally shallow, situational, tribal, and self-righteous. That is just my opinion, of course, but I would also point to the measurable, and measured, empathetic behavior of rightists, e.g. charitable giving, volunteering for disaster relief, etc.
Leftism is a status marker among the wealthy (look at Rob Henderson’s writings about ‘luxury beliefs’ for more on this topic) and the wealthy tend to be more neurotic and self-indulgent than the poors who have shit to do.
Yep, oddly enough, the wealthy are attracted to this. I do think it is the birth place of virtue signaling. they feel guilty about their good fortune, and so they try to feel better about who they are by "taking a stand" but then they get depressed because they just haven't thought the whole thing thru. For example, doing DEI hires mean you hurt those who truly merit the position. It's a disconnect that can only make them feel bad about their actions.
When your belief system and values are totally divorced from observable reality (and reality refuses to bend to your will), and you always blame someone/something else for your misfortunes, your mental health will obviously deteriorate. There have been studies about left wing beliefs and psychosis (full or borderline) stretching back to the nineties, so this article doesn't surprise me. Examples: Understanding left-wing authoritarianism: Relations to the dark personality traits, altruism, and social justice commitment by Ann Krispenz & Alex Bertrams and The long-term course of anxiety disorders by Ans Hovenkamp-Hermelink. Also: Locus of control and health behaviour revisited: A multivariate analysis of young adults from 18 countries by Andrew Steptoe and Jane Wardle and Locus of control and subjective well-being: Panel evidence from Australia by Dusanee Kesavayuth, Dai Binh Tran and, Vasileios Zikos.
Frankenheimer, you bring up an interesting point about the connection between belief systems, mental health, and how individuals perceive and respond to reality.
When beliefs are disconnected from reality and responsibility is consistently externalized, it can indeed lead to mental health challenges. How do you think these insights can be applied to improve mental health interventions and promote healthier coping mechanisms in individuals?
I must say your references to specific studies provide a solid foundation for further discussion on this important topic. Thank you for sharing!
Yes, Adam, I couldn't agree more. I was in a chaplaincy training program at a VERY liberal seminary. Giving our clients hope was the LAST thing they wanted us to do. We were actively discouraged from doing that. Instead we were to reinforce and affirm their victim status, and let them feel "heard." I worked in a prison and i could see that was not what clients wanted. I'm not sure it's appropriate for any client. We all need hope. I had a lot of trouble with that training, and now I ignore it.
Dr. Paul Conti, a renowned psychiatrist, points to two measures of highest personal wellness: Agency and Gratitude. Cultural Marxism / postmodernism is built on victimhood and grievance. No surprise to see these results.
I have noticed symptoms described in this work in many people who are cause-driven, regardless of their points-of-view on the political spectrum.
In the 1970s, I owned a graphic arts studio. My employees were three talented women, all of whom were active in left-leaning political causes. As a libertarian, I felt obliged to ensure my business was a place when ideas and opinions could be shared without censorship. Consequently, we would have lively discussions about everything. As the boss, although my employees knew my position on most issues, I made a point of holding back. Did not want anyone to feel they had to be careful of what they said because I would be offended. So mostly I listened and learned.
One of the women, a very talented artist, came in one day looking sad. She had attended a meeting the night before where she was chastised for spending time on her art, instead of the Cause. Until the revolution is successful, she was told, she needed to deny herself the pleasure of her painting.
The rest of us, the two employees and I, stopped our work and lovingly yelled at her. Even if the world is in bad shape, "we can't stop living and loving" was the key message. She went back to the next meeting, fortified, and told the naysayers that she was NOT giving up her art and the things she loved for the cause. She and another of the employees are still artists 50 years later.
At the time, I took the opportunity for a mini-lecture about Emma Goldman and shared her famous quote: "If I can't dance, I don't want to be in your revolution."
Thanks for this interesting post. I agree with some of the comments here that it is not just the left-leaning folks who lose their sense of perspective. It is too easy to become chronically bitter and depressed, regardless of how one sees the world.
If you believe the world should be a fair and equitable place it's going to be distressing that it is, in fact, absolutely not. If you believe that everyone's outcomes are based on the level of effort they put in, which has some truth but is absolutely not guaranteed, you may feel that the world is already just and be comfortable in it.
I'm a socialist because I can see that there are more than enough resources to go around (in the US, not globally) if they were more equally distributed and I don't care one iota whether that's fair or not to the people earning those resources. (which at over 300k/yr includes my own household) Mr. Burns doesn't need another ivory back scratcher when people at the opposite end of the financial spectrum are going to food pantries and forgoing medical care. The dissonance between what I see the world could be and how it actually is is very distressing to me.
I stay sane by focusing on the things that I can control and limiting me view to my own personal world, family, home, job, etc. To attempt to digest the unnecessary horrors of global reality are beyond my ability to cope with.
I really struggle with this post. While I can agree with the final call to reinforce better cognitive habits, I struggle to fully accept Greg's resolution to the mental health struggles among left-leaning students. In this post, I see no recognition that there may be more complex causality here. As the argument is presented, I understand it to argue the following: leftist students have worse mental health and this is because of the ideology of the left causes cognitive distortions among these students. I think there are other possible causes for this relationship, which I think are irresponsible not to mention:
1) Students with mental illness understand that their well-being is not entirely in their control and see leftist ideas as understanding that no individual has complete control over their circumstances - this represents this experience and thus they believe the ideas
2) There is a bi-causal relationship of the above and worsened mental health (e.g., mental illness both pushes people to believe in these leftist ideas, which also worsens their mental health)
3) It is not the cognitive distortion of black-and-white thinking that causes students on the left to have worse mental health but instead greater awareness of the struggles other people face
4) More compassionate people are more liberal and struggle more with poor mental health
I'm not asserting any of these to be true and these are just a few of potentially many explanatory factors, but I do not understand why no alternative reasoning is presented for why students on the left struggle more with mental illness.
"As far as the data shows, what seems like a blindfolded dive into illiberal ideology has left students on the left more miserable than ever." This is not what the data show. This may be a cause, but it honestly doesn't even seem to be the cause without far more evidence.
I think you are right that there are different factors at play. One is that, as I noted in my own comment, the waters have been muddied for twenty years between the political and the mental-health factors. But another element surely is the loss of community, to which both leftist and rightist commentators have gestured for forty years. Yet another is the medicalisation of both emotion and behaviour - everything has a pill for it.
And social-media, which of course has made everything - from cultural narcissism to physical isolation - far, far worse, in the last ten years. I don't think it's an accident that Tik Tok, where teens vie with one another as to who has the worse mental-health, is a weapon of cultural combat created and managed by the Chinese government.
You assume, as most do, that more people/everyone on the left is more compassionate and that they are therefore motivated by compassion. That’s a BIG mistake. There are plenty of manipulative people who use whatever they can - even compassion and empathy- just to get what they want. They use kind people and their naïveté for their own ends. When it comes to your needs- they may seemingly suddenly turn on you and viciously so, maybe even violently. Think communism in theory (“utopian”) and in practice (authoritarian and responsible for even more deaths collectively than even Hitler’s fascism. He was still and evil little fuck, but so were Stalin and Mao.) I think unfortunately manipulation is the “answer” to your fourth question: they are being manipulated in ways that require them to feel guilty as a motivator (especially to prove their compassion and righteousness.) 🤷♀️
Black and white thinking is horrible mental health. That’s not to say that it isn’t just as bad when applied to the “right” as the “left”, it is, that’s why it’s horrible for mental health. It also denies the complexities of life.
Aren't these samples, though, likely, as it were, to be 'contaminated'? In other words, would anyone who 'identifies as non-binary' be likely to also identify as conservative? The supposedly different sample groups, then, overlap. And thus the causal pathways are not evident.
What is evident, though, and has been for twenty years for people paying attention, is that mainstream focus on mental-health conditions has been yet another way of pointing to 'contradictions' in society: people have these problems, the subtext runs, 'because' of our unjust societies. Left-learning authorities have been making much of the 'crisis' - and it really is a crisis, but one they have had a strong role in creating, perpetuating, and profiting from - because all the hand-wringing means more spending, and spending means lots more empire-building for educationists, theorists, therapists, drug companies, and the like. In other words, the political (which is to say, the far-left account of Western society) and the 'health' aspects have been intertwined from the start, and a mere snapshot doesn't offer a particularly illuminating analysis.
I would like to see the frequency of self-identified non-binaries and self-reported mentally ill young people mapped onto specific neighborhoods of cities of various sizes, rural areas, etc. My hypotheses would be that non-binaries and allegedly mentally ill young people live in and around universities, and in white, affluent areas of Democratic controlled cities.
Yes, but why, is my question. Why has it been the aim of the left to preside over the creation of all these mental-health problems? If my theory is correct, they have viewed poor mental-health simply as another weapon to hasten the downfall of what they consider the unjust capitalist system. See also: their drug policies, and their 'crime' policies. How they imagine that they themselves will escape the consequences of these multiple disasters, I'm not sure.
The young female activists and their parents' generation of liberal do gooders are ignorant of the real world consequences that follow from their misguided efforts. They don't know much about the real world at all. The majority of them grew up in sheltered white upper middle class homes. The Soros and Pritzker families are another matter---George Soros explicitly told us that he was manipulating our elections intentionally.
Just as some people are sociopaths and psychopaths on the “capitalist Right-wing” - CEO’s of companies that, for example, made forever chemicals knowing they were unsafe and causing long term damage everywhere to everyone (including themselves, their own children and grandchildren etc) - there are psychopaths and sociopaths on the “illiberal far-left” (like Marx, Lennin, Stalin, Mao) who are just as Evil. They don’t really care about anyone or anything except getting what they want in the here and now. And they are vile and violent. I don’t use the word Evil casually or often, but that is really true evil.
"The solution to this mental health crisis is clear: teach and reinforce better habits."
One of the better habits is to avoid pathologizing all negative emotions. Psychiatry wants to label, diagnose, and prescribe meds for all sorts of natural human responses to difficulties in life. You're not just sad or feeling purposeless; you have major depressive disorder. Grieving is given an "acceptable" time limit, and then diagnosed as mental illness if it lasts "too long." Instead of helping you make a plan for addressing things that make you feel anxious, they say you have an anxiety disorder and then put you on life-altering meds.
Then...
The meds cause more symptoms and you get more diagnoses and meds, and it is all seen as a worsening of a previously existing condition rather than a result of the lack of proper non-pharmaceutical treatment and a reaction to the medications.
This is a very important piece. I hope it gets alot of attention in main stream media. Absolutely fascinating. And I am glad that I was, as my teenage daughter complained , “the strict one“,
So fascinating. My children's doctor is in a very progressive, heavily democratic part of town. His office sees a large portion of those on Medicaid (this does not equate progressivism) or who might be lumped into the far-left ideology camp. It "feels" like we are the only conservatives who still go there, but that's beside the point. Nevermind that they took out all the fun, classic books the kids used to read while waiting. You would get covid if the book was touched. Even the fishtank hit the curb because it was too much for parents to tell their kids not to hit the glass. Everytime we show up, they give my kids i-pads asking them if they are sad, if they have feelings of suicide, if they have friends, etc. The doctor reminds them they really should get the HPV shot, the flu shot, the covid shot, the shot shot. Oy. Then there's the lecture on not playing in the sun so you don't get cancer, staying isolated when someone in the family is sick, only eating vegetables so you don't get fat, etc. Always upon leaving, they say with a good laugh, "I feel sad and suicidal now!"
Some words are violence. Hate speech is violence. And some fragility is a result of simply seeing the world as it really is, as opposed to worldviews filtered through left or right lenses. Taking in the true scope of history is a risky endeavor. It breaks many people. Exposure to dissent is fine, but tolerating points of view that directly marginalize populations isn't anti-fragility. It's centrism. And centrism is why Pax-Americana stands where it currently stands. It all comes down to how connected the individual is to their collective, and whether they're willing to not only walk in others' shoes, but also to put others before themselves.
This. As much as I see the right wringing their hands about the suicide epidemic they can’t see their own part in labeling people as “wrong” or even “abominations.” It’s though they require people have a certain threshold of tolerance for mean treatment.
Sadly, that's because they haven't developed enough emotional maturity yet for true empathy. Which is what we're all going to learn eventually, in this world or another.
I see an awful lot of "catastrophizing, black and white thinking, overgeneralizing, discounting positives, and emotional reasoning" on the American right, right now. Yes, campus progs demonstrating for Gaza are not big on nuance, but neither are those opposing them.
As a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, I have seen firsthand the shift you describe. That's why in the summer of 2020, I moved away from providing individual psychotherapy sessions to conducting psychoeducation webinars. Now I teach large groups of people how to regulate their emotions, tolerate distress, mitigate conflict, manage stress, avoid burnout, get a good night's sleep, and many other necessary strategies and tools. It is rewarding work and I thoroughly enjoy doing it.
Although promising liberation, social justice distorts complex reality into simple clarity that disempowers. I know cuz I took on the guilty white male role during my PhD courses (to test it after years of opposing it on many grounds), and I’m still recovering from my subsequent mental health decline from 2020-22. It seriously sucks. Being assigned guilt cost me my sense of self-efficacy and agency. I don’t recommend it.
“Being assigned guilt cost me my sense of self-efficacy and agency. ”
That is its core purpose, of course.
I'm glad you had enough insight to pull yourself out of that trap.
Me too. FIRE and Heterodox Academy have helped. But willingly living it in academia among its adherents allowed me to document the experience, to know for myself. At least, I can better instruct my writing students of the limitations of intersectionality, social justice, CRT, etc.
👍
Having done that experiment, you should write about it. Possibly with a co-writer or healthcare professional so it doesn’t suck you back in. Ironically I grew up codependent and learned all these things (cognitive distortions) the hard way and married a dry drunk alcoholic. It took me 12 years to unravel all of that same stuff in Al-Anon, a framework for good mental health.
Good for you! 👍 If you do decide to write a book let us here know; I would be interested in buying it. 👍
Glad you were able to unravel the cognitive distortions you faced. Project Luminas works as my first draft of sorts for coming to terms with the ideology. I’ll certainly update you should it materialize as a book!
How do you think we can discuss that people have privilege without making them feel guilty?
How about the word, "Blessed." I was blessed to have stable, caring, educated parents. It's something to be grateful for, not to feel guilty about. Life is not a zero sum game. I am happy when I see the way others are blessed as well. When we look a little deeper, we see we all have blessings to appreciate and challenges to cope with and they are really hard to quantify and qualify. I've seen this working with both incarcerated individuals and CEO's and diplomats.
Acknowledge privileges result from complex individual choices more than an oppressive system. Completely dissociate privilege from guilt. Privilege is a function of complex individual, familial, cultural, class, and historical causes. Guilt results from transgressing a rule or law. DEI guilt reduces individual variance to an arbitrary yet universalized and essentialized characteristic: skin color. Hence minority partisan political roles based on racial allegiance and severe guilt when a freethinking individual transgresses prescribed roles: skin-folk should be kin-folk. Leading with DEI guilt means distorting individuals’ present complex present self via past group racial history. Such racial guilt to me is subtractive resentment not generative empowerment that acknowledges all the positive privilege that exists in people’s lives.
Everyone has the great privilege of just being alive, of having been born. Privilege has been redefined or at least weaponized to herd people like cattle to only one conclusion in all circumstances; namely that one’s privilege is an immutable trait that requires them to serve the interests of others without a thought for themselves (ever.) Having come from codependency I can tell you firsthand that is demoralizing and unhealthy. There is no way, the way they want you to conclude, to use “Privilege” in this way. The alternative is something that, ironically, our American culture previously tried to instill in people - treat others as you wish to be treated. The Golden Rule. Everyone has advantages and disadvantages, teach people how to be helpful without being used. The current system is usery at best, deliberate destruction of others at worst.
“Lucky”, “fortunate”, and/or “blessed” are all perfectly good words.
I don't think you can. Being designated as "privileged" is a judgement on the party. The judgement is highly negative and, in today's environment, equates them with an "oppressor."
RECOMMENDATION: Change your way of thinking about others. Claiming someone is "privileged" amounts to a type of hate speech. God forbid you do that.
I appreciate the work you do, Zander!
Thank You, Angel. The feeling is mutual.
Zander, it must be rewarding to see the positive effects of your work on such a broad scale.
How have your participants responded to these webinars, and what do you find most fulfilling about this new approach?
Also, I find your dedication to helping others is truly inspiring.
Thank you, Sol! It is immensely rewarding. Participants express gratitude for the reminder or encouragement to practice better self-care. I really enjoy hearing from people following the webinar who tell me stories about how applying the strategies I teach improved their sleep, relationship, mental well-being, confidence, and/or boundary setting. I recently published a book that outlines what I teach using myself as the example client - The Third Space: A Nonconformist's Guide to the Universe (on Amazon). Zander
One potential problem with this analysis: What if liberals are not more likely than conservatives to suffer from mental health problems, but are more likely to report them? If conservatives are more repressed than liberals, they might suffer from depression but be less likely to admit it and seek help. Or they might seek treatments (such as turning to religion) that allow them to deal with problems without admitting to them.
Another potential problem with this analysis: What if this correlation, if real, is causation in the other direction? In other words, what if liberalism does not cause mental illness, but people with mental illness are more likely to be liberal because their own problems cause them to have more empathy for the suffering of others?
I strongly lean toward the reverse causality story. That is, being emotionally fragile makes you attracted to social justice extremism. Consider the sexually nonbinaries. If you're old-fashioned like me and think that non-binary is a symptom of poor mental health, then it is not the ideology causing their emotional fragility. It is the other way around.
Another possible pathway: people start with better mental health when they enter these social justice movements but their mental health deteriorates as they spend more time being exposed to pessimistic views and cognitive distortions of their new online and in-person communities. They may have been attracted to these movements for a variety of non-fragile reasons - healthy compassion, a genuine desire to do good, or normal adolescent/young adult idealism and desire to explore new ideas - but their mental health is brought down over time. Young women are especially vulnerable to "catching" the negative moods of those around them.
This is a good point, and I found myself thinking it when reading this piece.
It's also possible that there's an unknown third factor that is causing both the mental health issues and the social justice extremism.
Claiming to have psychiatric conditions such as PTSD, Dissociative Identity Disorder, ADHD, and various abnormal "genders" is very popular among white females in my ultra liberal city. Not only are these young women reporting more psychiatric symptoms than other people do, they are "faking bad" mental health conditions.
I am very interested in collaborating and forming coalitions with like-minded people.
Citation needed that leftism = “empathy for others.” Yes, I am aware that leftism puts “empathy” on the letterhead but that doesn’t mean it’s genuine; I posit that it’s just branding. In my anecdotal experience the supposed empathy of leftists is generally shallow, situational, tribal, and self-righteous. That is just my opinion, of course, but I would also point to the measurable, and measured, empathetic behavior of rightists, e.g. charitable giving, volunteering for disaster relief, etc.
Yep, that is my experience and observation as well.
I very much recommend the excellent al-Gharbi piece that Greg links to as it does some of this analysis…
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2023/03/how-to-understand-the-well-being-gap-between-liberals-and-conservatives/
Or how poor people are more likely to lean left, and poor people also tend to be unhappier etc.
Leftism is a status marker among the wealthy (look at Rob Henderson’s writings about ‘luxury beliefs’ for more on this topic) and the wealthy tend to be more neurotic and self-indulgent than the poors who have shit to do.
Yep, oddly enough, the wealthy are attracted to this. I do think it is the birth place of virtue signaling. they feel guilty about their good fortune, and so they try to feel better about who they are by "taking a stand" but then they get depressed because they just haven't thought the whole thing thru. For example, doing DEI hires mean you hurt those who truly merit the position. It's a disconnect that can only make them feel bad about their actions.
Thank you for these great questions. I would love to see the authors address these.
When your belief system and values are totally divorced from observable reality (and reality refuses to bend to your will), and you always blame someone/something else for your misfortunes, your mental health will obviously deteriorate. There have been studies about left wing beliefs and psychosis (full or borderline) stretching back to the nineties, so this article doesn't surprise me. Examples: Understanding left-wing authoritarianism: Relations to the dark personality traits, altruism, and social justice commitment by Ann Krispenz & Alex Bertrams and The long-term course of anxiety disorders by Ans Hovenkamp-Hermelink. Also: Locus of control and health behaviour revisited: A multivariate analysis of young adults from 18 countries by Andrew Steptoe and Jane Wardle and Locus of control and subjective well-being: Panel evidence from Australia by Dusanee Kesavayuth, Dai Binh Tran and, Vasileios Zikos.
Frankenheimer, you bring up an interesting point about the connection between belief systems, mental health, and how individuals perceive and respond to reality.
When beliefs are disconnected from reality and responsibility is consistently externalized, it can indeed lead to mental health challenges. How do you think these insights can be applied to improve mental health interventions and promote healthier coping mechanisms in individuals?
I must say your references to specific studies provide a solid foundation for further discussion on this important topic. Thank you for sharing!
People need hope. These ways of thinking destroy hope.
Yes, Adam, I couldn't agree more. I was in a chaplaincy training program at a VERY liberal seminary. Giving our clients hope was the LAST thing they wanted us to do. We were actively discouraged from doing that. Instead we were to reinforce and affirm their victim status, and let them feel "heard." I worked in a prison and i could see that was not what clients wanted. I'm not sure it's appropriate for any client. We all need hope. I had a lot of trouble with that training, and now I ignore it.
I have personal experience with this. As my beliefs and attitudes have changed, I have become happier.
Dr. Paul Conti, a renowned psychiatrist, points to two measures of highest personal wellness: Agency and Gratitude. Cultural Marxism / postmodernism is built on victimhood and grievance. No surprise to see these results.
I have noticed symptoms described in this work in many people who are cause-driven, regardless of their points-of-view on the political spectrum.
In the 1970s, I owned a graphic arts studio. My employees were three talented women, all of whom were active in left-leaning political causes. As a libertarian, I felt obliged to ensure my business was a place when ideas and opinions could be shared without censorship. Consequently, we would have lively discussions about everything. As the boss, although my employees knew my position on most issues, I made a point of holding back. Did not want anyone to feel they had to be careful of what they said because I would be offended. So mostly I listened and learned.
One of the women, a very talented artist, came in one day looking sad. She had attended a meeting the night before where she was chastised for spending time on her art, instead of the Cause. Until the revolution is successful, she was told, she needed to deny herself the pleasure of her painting.
The rest of us, the two employees and I, stopped our work and lovingly yelled at her. Even if the world is in bad shape, "we can't stop living and loving" was the key message. She went back to the next meeting, fortified, and told the naysayers that she was NOT giving up her art and the things she loved for the cause. She and another of the employees are still artists 50 years later.
At the time, I took the opportunity for a mini-lecture about Emma Goldman and shared her famous quote: "If I can't dance, I don't want to be in your revolution."
Thanks for this interesting post. I agree with some of the comments here that it is not just the left-leaning folks who lose their sense of perspective. It is too easy to become chronically bitter and depressed, regardless of how one sees the world.
If you believe the world should be a fair and equitable place it's going to be distressing that it is, in fact, absolutely not. If you believe that everyone's outcomes are based on the level of effort they put in, which has some truth but is absolutely not guaranteed, you may feel that the world is already just and be comfortable in it.
I'm a socialist because I can see that there are more than enough resources to go around (in the US, not globally) if they were more equally distributed and I don't care one iota whether that's fair or not to the people earning those resources. (which at over 300k/yr includes my own household) Mr. Burns doesn't need another ivory back scratcher when people at the opposite end of the financial spectrum are going to food pantries and forgoing medical care. The dissonance between what I see the world could be and how it actually is is very distressing to me.
I stay sane by focusing on the things that I can control and limiting me view to my own personal world, family, home, job, etc. To attempt to digest the unnecessary horrors of global reality are beyond my ability to cope with.
I hope that you also assuage your discomfort by giving generously of your high household income to the needy.
Hi Andrea,
I really struggle with this post. While I can agree with the final call to reinforce better cognitive habits, I struggle to fully accept Greg's resolution to the mental health struggles among left-leaning students. In this post, I see no recognition that there may be more complex causality here. As the argument is presented, I understand it to argue the following: leftist students have worse mental health and this is because of the ideology of the left causes cognitive distortions among these students. I think there are other possible causes for this relationship, which I think are irresponsible not to mention:
1) Students with mental illness understand that their well-being is not entirely in their control and see leftist ideas as understanding that no individual has complete control over their circumstances - this represents this experience and thus they believe the ideas
2) There is a bi-causal relationship of the above and worsened mental health (e.g., mental illness both pushes people to believe in these leftist ideas, which also worsens their mental health)
3) It is not the cognitive distortion of black-and-white thinking that causes students on the left to have worse mental health but instead greater awareness of the struggles other people face
4) More compassionate people are more liberal and struggle more with poor mental health
I'm not asserting any of these to be true and these are just a few of potentially many explanatory factors, but I do not understand why no alternative reasoning is presented for why students on the left struggle more with mental illness.
"As far as the data shows, what seems like a blindfolded dive into illiberal ideology has left students on the left more miserable than ever." This is not what the data show. This may be a cause, but it honestly doesn't even seem to be the cause without far more evidence.
I think you are right that there are different factors at play. One is that, as I noted in my own comment, the waters have been muddied for twenty years between the political and the mental-health factors. But another element surely is the loss of community, to which both leftist and rightist commentators have gestured for forty years. Yet another is the medicalisation of both emotion and behaviour - everything has a pill for it.
And social-media, which of course has made everything - from cultural narcissism to physical isolation - far, far worse, in the last ten years. I don't think it's an accident that Tik Tok, where teens vie with one another as to who has the worse mental-health, is a weapon of cultural combat created and managed by the Chinese government.
You assume, as most do, that more people/everyone on the left is more compassionate and that they are therefore motivated by compassion. That’s a BIG mistake. There are plenty of manipulative people who use whatever they can - even compassion and empathy- just to get what they want. They use kind people and their naïveté for their own ends. When it comes to your needs- they may seemingly suddenly turn on you and viciously so, maybe even violently. Think communism in theory (“utopian”) and in practice (authoritarian and responsible for even more deaths collectively than even Hitler’s fascism. He was still and evil little fuck, but so were Stalin and Mao.) I think unfortunately manipulation is the “answer” to your fourth question: they are being manipulated in ways that require them to feel guilty as a motivator (especially to prove their compassion and righteousness.) 🤷♀️
Black and white thinking is horrible mental health. That’s not to say that it isn’t just as bad when applied to the “right” as the “left”, it is, that’s why it’s horrible for mental health. It also denies the complexities of life.
I saw this day in and day out when I taught. Students and faculty alike.
Aren't these samples, though, likely, as it were, to be 'contaminated'? In other words, would anyone who 'identifies as non-binary' be likely to also identify as conservative? The supposedly different sample groups, then, overlap. And thus the causal pathways are not evident.
What is evident, though, and has been for twenty years for people paying attention, is that mainstream focus on mental-health conditions has been yet another way of pointing to 'contradictions' in society: people have these problems, the subtext runs, 'because' of our unjust societies. Left-learning authorities have been making much of the 'crisis' - and it really is a crisis, but one they have had a strong role in creating, perpetuating, and profiting from - because all the hand-wringing means more spending, and spending means lots more empire-building for educationists, theorists, therapists, drug companies, and the like. In other words, the political (which is to say, the far-left account of Western society) and the 'health' aspects have been intertwined from the start, and a mere snapshot doesn't offer a particularly illuminating analysis.
I would like to see the frequency of self-identified non-binaries and self-reported mentally ill young people mapped onto specific neighborhoods of cities of various sizes, rural areas, etc. My hypotheses would be that non-binaries and allegedly mentally ill young people live in and around universities, and in white, affluent areas of Democratic controlled cities.
Yes, but why, is my question. Why has it been the aim of the left to preside over the creation of all these mental-health problems? If my theory is correct, they have viewed poor mental-health simply as another weapon to hasten the downfall of what they consider the unjust capitalist system. See also: their drug policies, and their 'crime' policies. How they imagine that they themselves will escape the consequences of these multiple disasters, I'm not sure.
The young female activists and their parents' generation of liberal do gooders are ignorant of the real world consequences that follow from their misguided efforts. They don't know much about the real world at all. The majority of them grew up in sheltered white upper middle class homes. The Soros and Pritzker families are another matter---George Soros explicitly told us that he was manipulating our elections intentionally.
Just as some people are sociopaths and psychopaths on the “capitalist Right-wing” - CEO’s of companies that, for example, made forever chemicals knowing they were unsafe and causing long term damage everywhere to everyone (including themselves, their own children and grandchildren etc) - there are psychopaths and sociopaths on the “illiberal far-left” (like Marx, Lennin, Stalin, Mao) who are just as Evil. They don’t really care about anyone or anything except getting what they want in the here and now. And they are vile and violent. I don’t use the word Evil casually or often, but that is really true evil.
"The solution to this mental health crisis is clear: teach and reinforce better habits."
One of the better habits is to avoid pathologizing all negative emotions. Psychiatry wants to label, diagnose, and prescribe meds for all sorts of natural human responses to difficulties in life. You're not just sad or feeling purposeless; you have major depressive disorder. Grieving is given an "acceptable" time limit, and then diagnosed as mental illness if it lasts "too long." Instead of helping you make a plan for addressing things that make you feel anxious, they say you have an anxiety disorder and then put you on life-altering meds.
Then...
The meds cause more symptoms and you get more diagnoses and meds, and it is all seen as a worsening of a previously existing condition rather than a result of the lack of proper non-pharmaceutical treatment and a reaction to the medications.
This is a very important piece. I hope it gets alot of attention in main stream media. Absolutely fascinating. And I am glad that I was, as my teenage daughter complained , “the strict one“,
So fascinating. My children's doctor is in a very progressive, heavily democratic part of town. His office sees a large portion of those on Medicaid (this does not equate progressivism) or who might be lumped into the far-left ideology camp. It "feels" like we are the only conservatives who still go there, but that's beside the point. Nevermind that they took out all the fun, classic books the kids used to read while waiting. You would get covid if the book was touched. Even the fishtank hit the curb because it was too much for parents to tell their kids not to hit the glass. Everytime we show up, they give my kids i-pads asking them if they are sad, if they have feelings of suicide, if they have friends, etc. The doctor reminds them they really should get the HPV shot, the flu shot, the covid shot, the shot shot. Oy. Then there's the lecture on not playing in the sun so you don't get cancer, staying isolated when someone in the family is sick, only eating vegetables so you don't get fat, etc. Always upon leaving, they say with a good laugh, "I feel sad and suicidal now!"
Some words are violence. Hate speech is violence. And some fragility is a result of simply seeing the world as it really is, as opposed to worldviews filtered through left or right lenses. Taking in the true scope of history is a risky endeavor. It breaks many people. Exposure to dissent is fine, but tolerating points of view that directly marginalize populations isn't anti-fragility. It's centrism. And centrism is why Pax-Americana stands where it currently stands. It all comes down to how connected the individual is to their collective, and whether they're willing to not only walk in others' shoes, but also to put others before themselves.
This. As much as I see the right wringing their hands about the suicide epidemic they can’t see their own part in labeling people as “wrong” or even “abominations.” It’s though they require people have a certain threshold of tolerance for mean treatment.
Sadly, that's because they haven't developed enough emotional maturity yet for true empathy. Which is what we're all going to learn eventually, in this world or another.
I see an awful lot of "catastrophizing, black and white thinking, overgeneralizing, discounting positives, and emotional reasoning" on the American right, right now. Yes, campus progs demonstrating for Gaza are not big on nuance, but neither are those opposing them.