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.
© Chart created by Zach Goldberg.
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. Turning 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.
Reader Comments
Excerpt:
“It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.” — George Orwell, 1984
"Orwell was writing about a dystopian world he envisioned, but his words perfectly describe the adherence and vociferous dominance of the “woke world” afflicting Western civilization today.
"What I do know and do see is that for whatever reason, my impression is that there are a hell of a lot more alpha women out there today than there are alpha males. That in itself might not be inherently bad, all other things being equal. But all other things are not equal. Over the past half-century or so, as the economic independence and political participation of women have grown significantly in the West (less so elsewhere, of course), the cohesion of most Western societies has grown increasingly ragged and the nuclear family – the basic building-block of the civilization they built – has become increasingly fragmented.
"The leadership was increasingly dominated by Jewish women, many of them cultural Marxists (i.e., adherents of identity politics), joined by equally radical black women;Their goals extended beyond the betterment of women into issues and institutions affecting society (e.g., transgenderism) and even its foreign policies; and their long-term objective – known but largely concealed even in the late 1960s – was nothing less than the destruction of the nuclear family, which as the basic building-block of Western societies meant the destruction of those societies themselves.
"Breaking the traditional bonds between mother and child on the one hand, and man and woman – husband and wife – on the other, fragments the traditional nuclear family. In this way, the cultural Marxists expected to undermine Western civilization and Eurocentric culture by destroying the core foundation stones of both. They are succeeding, and empowering women is the lever they have used.
"Women are also far more capable than most men of deliberate or unthinking cruelty. It is not mere coincidence that from Celts to Chinese to Comanche (to name but a few), their women were the ones who butchered, wounded, and tortured enemy prisoners (though to be fair, there have been cultures where the men were equally enthusiastic)."
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An excellent article, which complements and extends this present article. What it describes is indeed a mass psychosis, a mass insanity of gender confusion, which is intended to destroy our civilization from within. I highly recommend it - LG.
“I have two enemies, just as evil has two shores: those that step on others, and those that allow themselves to be stepped on.” Facundo Cabral.
The terms left and right are meaningless these days. Left used to mean Marxist and any definition of left that does not include that is not left, but just a covert soggy right winger. To call the Biden administration and the Democratic party left is a travesty, a complete nonsense.
Blatantly stupid statement, typical of US wooly-minded thinking.
Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality and equality before the law. Liberals espouse various views depending on their understanding of these principles. However, Liberals almost universally support capitalism, private property, market economies, the current 'hierarchy' and stratification of society (elitism) and social and economic inequality. Liberals are not ‘Leftists’.
Left-wing politics describes the range of political ideologies that support and seek to achieve social and economic equality and egalitarianism, in opposition to social hierarchy and the capitalist system. Leftist movements wish to remove the capitalist system, and replace it with one which is economically fair to all and non-hierarchical and non-elitist. (“From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”). Leftism includes the labour movement, socialism, communism, Marxism, anarchism and syndicalism, (but not Liberalism).
What are often described as ‘woke’ topics, such as gay rights, are within the left generally thought to be subordinate to, and often caused by, the main issue of social and economic inequality. However, such issues are often leveraged by Liberals merely as weapons against their supposed enemies, in a short-sighted way which has no insight into why these discriminations exist. Most of those pushing a ‘woke’ agenda are Liberals - not ‘leftists’.
It may be convenient for conservatives to conflate those two different (and basically opposed) movements, but it ultimately won’t help them if they rely on such a confused analysis. (The term 'cultural Marxism' has no objective meaning, and is just another conflation of 'Liberalist' culture war [or imaginary weaponising of hypocrisy] with Marxist class war - which is a reality-based analysis.)
Liberalism is absolutely not left, it is usually called soft left and in practice it is exactly the same as right. Genuine left politics is Marxist. Socialism and Communism of course do have (or should have or are not what they say they are). Anarchism and Syndicalism - I give way on those - not sufficiently well versed there.
It's very important for the establishment to confuse people with terms in an Orwellian way. This is why the original meaning of 'Liberalism' (and what it meant say 40 years ago) was deliberately confused with 'Neo liberalism', which has no relation to that meaning whatsoever, as it is an arch right-wing hyper social Darwinist conservatism.