When Rebecca McFaul woke up in her small farmhouse in Logan, Utah, on a cold January day, she felt the same way she\u2019d been feeling for months: \u201cA certain kind of terror and horror at it all.\u201d Most of her family lives in Minnesota, and for weeks, she\u2019d watched from afar as families were taken by agents, activists were shot and tear gas hung in the air.<\/p>\n
A music professor at Utah State University, she\u2019d spent the day with her students, but struggled to focus. Then she came home and read more bad news, this time, a piece in the newspaper about two Maga influencers railing against the dangers of compassion in response to the detainment of 5-year-old Liam Ramos<\/a> in Minneapolis. \u201cIt was such a betrayal on every level,\u201d McFaul said. \u201cOf sisterhood, of motherhood, of decency.\u201d<\/p>\n It had been a year that already seemed long with terrible things in the news. But for McFaul, this was the last straw. She was filled with a rage she hadn\u2019t known was in her. She couldn\u2019t shake the thought: \u201cThis is seismic. This is just all upside down.\u201d<\/p>\n A typical therapist might say McFaul was depressed and give her some exercises to regulate her nervous system or some medication to take the edge off. But the queer scholar and writer Ann Cvetkovitch<\/a> has a different name for McFaul\u2019s dark mood. She is experiencing classic symptoms of \u201cpolitical depression\u201d \u2013 the knowledge that the world is falling apart paired with the \u201csense that customary forms of political response \u2026 are no longer working either to change the world or to make us feel better\u201d.<\/p>\n Political depression might look like traditional depression \u2013 the same hopelessness, despair and shutdown \u2013 but its source is different. It doesn\u2019t come from within, at least not primarily, Cvetkovitch wrote in her 2012 book, Depression: A Public Feeling. It comes from the violence, collapse or unjustness of the world around us.<\/p>\n In recent years, political depression has infiltrated the public discourse, the private consciousness and the therapist\u2019s office. Two-thirds of respondents in a 2024 LifeStance Health survey<\/a> said they talk about politics or elections with their therapists. Therapists, too, are noticing an influx of clients seeking support for political stress. The day after the 2024 election, platforms like Zocdoc and Spring Health saw a surge in mental health appointments and new member accounts, Forbes reported<\/a>. Therapy practices host blogs devoted to political depression and anxiety, with some therapists specializing in the treatment of political woes. Universities from Georgetown to Missouri State have responded to political anxieties on campus with post-election \u201ccoping spaces\u201d that offer everything from distraction \u2013 Lego sets and coloring books \u2013 to phone-free zones and free counseling services.<\/p>\n Studies show political stress takes a very real toll on people\u2019s mental and physical health. In a survey<\/a> study tracking the health impacts of politics between 2017 and 2020, Kevin Smith, a political scientist, and his colleagues found that political stress was linked to serious fatigue, sleep loss, anger, compulsive behaviors and even suicidal thinking. Young, left-leaning and politically engaged people were hit hardest.<\/p>\n Brett Ford, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Toronto who studies stress and emotion, says politics has become a form of chronic stress. \u201cChronic stressors are large-scale, they don\u2019t have clear endpoints, they feel out of your hands, and they reliably evoke negative emotions,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Part of Ford\u2019s work involves identifying practices that help people reduce their level of political distress. Turning off the news and distraction help, as do certain kinds of cognitive reframing, but Ford said there\u2019s a tradeoff to tuning out, because the same strategies that help people cope can also lower people\u2019s motivation to act.<\/p>\n The key for Ford is finding strategies that protect people\u2019s mental health without encouraging them to check out. \u201cWe need people to have to be OK in terms of their mental health, and we also need them to be engaged,\u201d Ford said.<\/p>\n Feeling bad about the state of the world doesn\u2019t feel good. But Ford says it is realistic \u2013 and even motivating. \u201cNegative emotions are a really consistent predictor of political engagement and action,\u201d Ford said. When people volunteer, donate and protest, positive emotions like compassion, admiration and pride sustain their work, she said, and taking action leads to more feelings of agency, efficacy and alignment with their values.<\/p>\n \u201cIf we let those emotions be and just allow them, [we can] consider ways of coping that connect us to our community, that help us feel engaged, that help us feel a sense of agency or control,\u201d Ford said.<\/p>\n Increasingly, therapists say this kind of political distress is showing up in their offices, whether they invite it in or not. What once might have been treated as background noise \u2013 the news, the election cycle, the culture war \u2013 is now the presenting problem itself. And they have had to adapt.<\/p>\n \u201cA person does not exist in a vacuum,\u201d said Shahem Mclaurin, a licensed clinical social worker, therapist and mental health influencer. \u201cWhen they come to you about, say, anxiety, it\u2019s not just them experiencing anxiety alone. They\u2019re experiencing that anxiety within a system.\u201d<\/p>\n A former youth organizer in Baltimore who now has a private clinical practice in New York, Maclaurin has seen a lot of that sort of anxiety lately. Some clients come in angry. Some are frustrated. Some can\u2019t name what\u2019s causing their feelings, but others know exactly what\u2019s wrong. On 6 January 2021, Maclaurin was in a session with a client as protesters stormed the Capitol. His client was trying to talk about regular things, but had to stop. He couldn\u2019t focus on himself. More recently, when Minneapolis resident Renee Nicole Good<\/a> was shot by immigration agents, it was Mclaurin who had to ask his clients for a break so he could process what had happened.<\/p>\n To Mclaurin, bringing politics into his therapy room doesn\u2019t feel out of bounds. It feels essential. \u201cThese things impact all of us, and pretending like they don\u2019t have an impact on your clients\u2019 personal lives is kind of ridiculous,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n So much of mainstream therapy tries to help the client accept and adapt to the society they live in, Mclaurin said. And that makes him roll his eyes. \u201cI think there are some things we shouldn\u2019t accept,\u201d he said. \u201cYou shouldn\u2019t accept that the world is so fucked up, you should be aware, and you should find ways to get involved to make your life easier.\u201d<\/p>\n That can look like helping a Black client understand that their unemployment is partly a result of economic racism and discriminatory housing practices, or using appointment time to help a low-income client find affordable housing. It can look like making an Instagram reel answering a client\u2019s question about how to defend themselves from hate and bigotry.<\/p>\n But Mclaurin says his main job is to help people to practice what he calls \u201cthe choice of hope\u201d, to remind people to connect with their bigger communities and believe in their capacity to change things. \u201cOne person standing outside worrying about a topic is just a person yelling,\u201d he said. \u201cBut when it\u2019s a group of people, it\u2019s a protest.\u201d<\/p>\n Community \u2013 along with humor \u2013 is also how Cvetkovich responded to a growing sense of political malaise as a young activist. Starting in the early aughts, she began hosting public support groups for people overwhelmed by the state of the world and helped to organize cheeky events such as the International Day of the Politically Depressed<\/a>, where activists dressed in bathrobes to express their world-weariness and passed out buttons that said, \u201cDepressed? It Might Be Political!\u201d<\/p>\n For Cvetkovich, the point is to slow down and be together with others who feel similar things. \u201cSometimes we just need some space to reckon with how sad or disturbed we are about what\u2019s going on,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd that might be the goal for the day.\u201d<\/p>\n