The Mental Health of political ideology
If you read the Guardian, you are more likely to experience mental health issues than if you read the Telegraph or even the Daily Mail (I know!). That isn’t even a controversial thing to say: liberals suffer from worse mental health than conservatives.[1] This is so well established that most of the studies cited below have moved past testing the phenomenon onto trying to explain it.
I’m paraphrasing here but what get commonly offered up (and psychology is a liberal leaning subject, and most psychologists have a liberal mind set) are varieties of explanations around liberals being more sensitive to social injustice and inequality. That is appealing (I’m a Guardian reader myself) but this striking finding probably deserves more than that kind of ‘too good for this cruel world’ romanticism.
Whatever genuine concern people feel about social or environmental issues, there is always something more personal also going on. If you’ve just taken a hammer to a Velasquez[2] in order to Just Stop Oil, it’s only because extreme measures are justified to get people’s attention because this is important, really important, more important than centuries old art that has been revered by generations. And that makes you important too, thrillingly important, too important to be bound by ordinary rules.
That’s a handy idea when it comes to the crucial task facing us all of managing self-esteem, particularly if you’re a young student with uncertain employment prospects who might be having quite a hard time trying to find ways not to feel worthless. Except, ultimately, that is unlikely to be a good strategy for mental health: it’s got too much anxiety and aggression in it and it brings trouble, and more anxiety and aggression, which will work against self-esteem.
Environmental activism is an interesting example because it isn’t necessarily aligned with liberal politics: there are plenty of environmental activists with quite pronounced conservative views on socio-economic issues. But what environmental activism often does have in common with a lot of liberal and left-wing political expression is a sense of injury and anger, a conviction that something needs to be done urgently and bad people are getting in the way.
And so does mental healthcare. From the start, it had an air of counterculture as psychotherapy and psychiatry struggled to establish themselves against traditional medicine. From Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents to modern twitterati,[3] mental healthcare has always been quick to critique the workings of society and agitate for change (in a way that your average gastroenterologist isn’t). The notion of injury - trauma, Adverse Childhood Events, neglect, abuse, a deficit in care - has always been front and centre. And over time, mental healthcare has developed a sense of itself as the underfunded dumping ground for a dysfunctional society that doesn’t care.
And it’s the idea of care that is critical here: care and complaint.
It’s not liberalism, per se, that’s bad for people, it’s not progressive ideas or support for equality or fairness, it’s the sense of injury, the disappointment, the frustration, grievance, resentment, the anxiety and aggression and it’s the unweaned appetite for care they flow from, that cause the harm.
Those states of mind are hallmarks of mental illness and, unfortunatey, they have become entrenched in mental healthcare too. From there, they’ve leached into the mainstream and one of the manifestations has been an unholy symbiosis between mental illness and liberal ideology. You can find a lot of grievance and resentment masquerading as concern for others in expressions of liberal ideology. But, it's not the ideas, it’s the sense of injury, of hurt and the thwarted, endless desire for care that draws people to those ideas and that drives how they get articulated and used, that’s the problem.
Last week, Judith Butler, best-selling author, Professor at Berkley, one of the world’s leading authorities on gender studies, feminism and queer theory and uncompromising commentator on…. well, anything really, was interviewed over lunch by the FT in connection with the publication of their new book Who’s Afraid of Gender?[4]
At the age of 14, Butler’s parents took them to a psychiatrist. The sessions “were great, because he refused to fix me! In the end he told me I was quite lucky to be able to love anybody at all, coming from my family background”.
Oh FFS Judith, you too? Oh well, OK, poor you.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S009265661100170X// https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/unique-everybody-else/202103/personality-traits-mental-illness-and-ideology. // https://magazine.columbia.edu/article/why-depression-rates-are-higher-among-liberals. // https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2023/03/how-to-understand-the-well-being-gap-between-liberals-and-conservatives/#:~:text=In%20any%20case%2C%20investigations%20consistently,with%20mental%20illnesses%20or%20disorders. // https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8713953/. // https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://osf.io/vbqw9/download&ved=2ahUKEwiW3o6gnOiEAxWa7wIHHRsVCQQQFnoECBYQAQ&usg=AOvVaw3jm8rZSRXwLLrT5RIDqxYv // https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/pops.12347 // https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev-polisci-051010-111659 //https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352827322001938 // https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/socf.12966 //https://news.northeastern.edu/2023/05/31/mental-health-politics-liberal-conservative/ // https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/3087517/1/PP-2019-229%20Accepted%20Manuscript.pdf /
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/nov/06/just-stop-oil-protesters-smash-glass-painting-national-gallery
[3] The Mental Elf (@Mental_Elf) posted at 7:35 AM on Thu, Mar 14, 2024:
In his debut blog, @FilipKaleta_ from @Kingspsychol
@SGDPCentreKCL summarises findings from the @BeeWellUK study, which explored inequalities in adolescent wellbeing based on gender and sexual identity.
#LGBTQ #Inequalities #GenderIdentity #SexualIdentity #YouthMentalHealth https://t.co/DhAdCOaO1w
(https://x.com/Mental_Elf/status/1768179131961704480?t=MVL5GL6mVoRVlOCpLivQGA&s=03)
[4] https://www.ft.com/content/cfe35ca1-9dbd-4a83-a3a9-372967ab5fac