Last month, when I published a column asking \u201cIs \u2018Trump Derangement Syndrome\u2019 Real?\u201d in The Wall Street Journal, I expected it to spark lively debate.<\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t anticipate a live demonstration of the very pathology I\u2019d described.<\/p>\n
My column outlined a pattern I see in my psychotherapy practice<\/a> every week.<\/p>\n I call it \u201cobsessive political preoccupation,\u201d a presentation that resembles an obsessive-compulsive pattern in which one political figure becomes the center of intrusive thoughts<\/a>, heightened arousal, and compulsive monitoring that takes over a person\u2019s mental bandwidth.<\/p>\n TDS is not an actual diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and I made that clear in my article.<\/p>\n But patients tell me about political thoughts that hijack their day, sleepless nights, irritability, anger and anxiety that spills into work and relationships.<\/p>\n One woman said she couldn\u2019t enjoy a family vacation because \u201cit felt wrong to relax while Trump was still out there.\u201d<\/p>\n I see marriages strained, friendships fractured and daily functioning disrupted by the mere mention of \u201cDonald Trump.\u201d<\/p>\n For many, their anxiety has outgrown politics and become a way of operating in the world<\/a>, shaping every reaction before they even realize it.<\/p>\n As soon as my column was posted online, the response illustrated my point with almost clinical precision.<\/p>\n Many of the loudest critics merely reacted to my use of the term \u201cTDS,\u201d not to my explanation.<\/p>\n Their retorts, immediate and emotional, displayed the very pattern I described: impulsive, catastrophic thinking driven by feeling rather than reflection.<\/p>\n In trying to disprove the phenomenon, they demonstrated it dramatically.<\/p>\n Two days later I discussed the piece live on\u00a0Fox News, and the reaction intensified.<\/p>\n The segment was calm and clinical. <\/p>\n But once the clips hit social media, they were stripped of context, paired with heated captions, and fed into outrage feeds.<\/p>\n The surge of emotional messages I received was immediate and relentless.<\/p>\n Some accused me of defending a fascist.<\/p>\n Others called me a \u201cpedophile protector,\u201d and one self-identified therapist suggested I must be a pedophile myself.<\/p>\n Several messages, including voicemails, wished me dead.<\/p>\n These weren\u2019t fringe accounts, but people who publicly describe themselves as compassionate, trauma-informed, or dedicated to mental-health work.<\/p>\n Their reaction is exactly what concerns me as a clinician.<\/p>\n My op-ed warned that emotional reasoning dominates much of our political culture.<\/p>\n Disagreement is treated as cruelty. <\/p>\n Discomfort is treated as danger.<\/p>\n When people fuse their identity to their political emotions, challenging those emotions feels like an attack on the self.<\/p>\n And this pattern appears across the political spectrum.<\/p>\n The critics who condemned the piece reenacted the pattern in real time.<\/p>\n Their outrage became their evidence. <\/p>\n Their feelings became their argument.<\/p>\n They proved my point more clearly than anything I could have written \u2014 and that\u2019s why we need to talk about these symptoms openly.<\/p>\n Our society encourages people to \u201ctrust their truth,\u201d to follow every impulse and to label ordinary discomfort as harm.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\tGet opinions and commentary from our columnists\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSubscribe to our daily Post Opinion newsletter!\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\tThanks for signing up!\n\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n Too many in my profession have encouraged this view<\/a>. <\/p>\n They now celebrate it \u2014 when directed at the \u201cright\u201d targets.<\/p>\n I see the consequences daily, as a patient tells me she\u2019s stopped speaking to her father because he \u201cvoted the wrong way,\u201d or a couple avoids family gatherings because a relative supports Trump.<\/p>\n These are educated adults who have adopted the idea that emotional discomfort equals danger.<\/p>\n The backlash I experienced clarified the consequences.<\/p>\n When people show hostility to the point of threatening death the moment their feelings are activated, we\u2019re no longer dealing with political disagreement, but with a profound emotional problem that affects far more than elections.<\/p>\n We need to relearn how to tolerate emotional discomfort.<\/p>\n