During the springtime of 2017, I told a good friend that I was worried about almost everyone we knew. Anyone politically left of center seemed to be anxious, depressed, addicted to everything bad, and looking forward to nothing.
“It’s Trump,” my friend said, downing his third Bloody Mary before lunchtime. “We’re all falling apart.”
We weren’t alone. The first Trump administration caused deep mental distress among liberals, leftists, and many apolitical people with a strong sense of human decency. The problem was sometimes derisively called “Trump derangement syndrome,” but it was real. The American Psychological Association found that the outcome of the 2016 election caused a dramatic spike in American stress levels. Shrinks reported an increase in patients severely distressed over politics; at the time, I remember one therapist telling me that some days, his patients talked about nothing else. That psychic stress took a physical toll, with an increase in stress-related ailments from headaches to cardiac arrhythmias. Calls to suicide hotlines went up.
This time around, there’s plenty to worry about as we gear up for Trump 2.0: mass deportations, increased political violence, policies that will exacerbate disasters worsened by climate change like the fires now consuming Los Angeles. Nightmares will turn real. Then there are the dangers that have never kept us up at night because we didn’t have enough imagination to fear them, like a war over Greenland. And then as now, many will worry about their own safety and financial future; economic inequality is already catastrophic and will only worsen under Trump.
Then as now, Trump’s presidency is a danger to our mental health because he is alienating and divisive, his far-right policies cause us anxiety, and he is a master of staying in the news. For anyone who has ever been victimized by a bully or a narcissistic man, Trump is almost unbearably evocative.
As he returns to…
Auteur: Liza Featherstone
