But I’m also interested in the role that politics plays in the disastrous state of American mental health, which is one of the biggest stories in the country right now. For our entire division, there is a fairly broad consensus that the country is, psychologically, in a terrible place. According to a recent USA Today/Suffolk University PollNearly nine in 10 registered voters believe there is a mental health crisis in the United States. The crisis is expressed in all kinds of ways: in rising rates of youth suicide, record drug overdoses, random acts of street violence, months of duration waiting lists for child therapists, mask crisis, Qanon.
I have long thought that the widespread psychological distress, intensely intensified by the pandemic, contributes to the disruption of American politics. But perhaps the causality also works the other way, and the ugliness of American politics is affecting the psyche of the citizenry.
Smith first surveyed a sample of around 800 people on politics and mental health in March 2017. As he wrote in a paper 2019, found fairly high levels of distress: In addition to the 40 percent who said they were stressed about politics, a fifth or more reported “losing sleep, being fatigued or depressed because of politics.” Up to a quarter of those surveyed reported self-destructive or compulsive behaviors, including “saying and writing things they later regret,” “making poor decisions” and “ignoring other priorities.”
At the time, he thought he might be capturing the impact of Trump’s election. But the next two surveys of him, in October and November 2020, showed similar or higher levels of misery. Now, those were also moments of feverish political activity; perhaps if Smith had surveyed people in 2018 or 2019, he would have found less political angst. However, his findings suggest that there are tens of millions of Americans who have felt crushed by our political environment.
In a way, this is surprising. Most people are not addicted to politics. Most American adults are not on Twitter, which tends to generate political news microcycles. Even in an election year, more people watched the 30 season from “Dancing with the Stars” that the most successful primetime shows on Fox News, the nation’s most-watched cable news network. Like political scientists Yanna Krupnikov and John Barry Ryan wrote in The New York Timesthe majority of Americans, “more than 80 percent to 85 percent, follow politics casually or don’t follow politics at all.”
