Liberal youth are far more depressed than their conservative counterparts — especially the girls

A Columbia University study revealed a striking difference between conservative and liberal teenagers. Conservatives are generally happier than their leftist counterparts — not by a little, but by a significant measure.

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While some have since proffered various explanations for the delta, such as the impact of social media or respondents’ religiosity, there is a growing sense that the progressive mentality is a key depressive factor.

Unwoke and smiling

The study, entitled, “The politics of depression: Diverging trends in internalizing symptoms among US adolescents by political beliefs,” was published in the journal Social Science & Medicine – Mental Health in December.

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The researchers found that “conservatives reported lower average depressive affect, self-derogation, and loneliness scores and higher self-esteem scores than all other groups.”

Some of the findings, reduced to bullet point:

• Generally, conservative kids were happier than their liberal counterparts.
• Conservative guys were slighter sadder than the conservative girls, until 2016, when girls scored higher.
• The more educated the family, the more likely the kids were to be depressed. (I wonder if they broke it down by educational institution of the parents?  Aggie offspring of 20 years ago are markedly different than their Ivy League counterparts.)

Whereas conservatives may have been better equipped to handle reality, the researchers also intimated that liberals may have had a harder time internalizing “a series of significant political events,” such as the election of a black president in 2008; the Great Recession; the student debt crisis; Republicans taking control of Congress; and former President Donald Trump’s 2016 victory.

The researchers indicated the spike in liberals’ emotional instability in recent years might also have something to do with “war, climate change, school shootings, structural racism, police violence against Black people, pervasive sexism and sexual assault, and rampant socioeconomic inequality [that] became unavoidable features of political discourse.”

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I look at that list and ask – how many of those crises were media phantoms, and how many were real?  How responsible is the media in creating a culture of mental dis-ease?

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Why are liberals so sad?

Musa al-Gharbi, writing in American Affairs, noted that this study is not the first to highlight that conservatives “do not just report higher levels of happiness, they also report higher levels of meaning in their lives.”

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Additionally, people “who are unwell may be especially attracted to liberal politics over conservatism for a variety of reasons.”

To that I say, in the vernacular of my childhood: “No s**t, Sherlock!”  Hurt people hurt people.  Sad people, and those who haven’t succeeded or are unhappy with the way their lives are turning out, are drawn to a though process that rationalizes their status: “it’s not your fault, you’re a victim” or “here you are, you rudderless skull of mush, here’s your purpose in life: go to the street and chant to /save the whales/save the world/fight for the supposed oppressed/etc.”

“Instead of changing the things they can change and seeking the grace to accept the things they can’t, they’re dwelling unproductively as problems fester,” wrote Yglesias.

I repeat the above vernacular.

While catastrophizing is bad for the soul, Yglesias indicated that progressive institutional leaders have taught young ideologues that it’s a “good way to get what they want.” (Emphasis mine)

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Filipovic added, “Just about everything researchers understand about resilience and mental well-being suggests that people who feel like they are the chief architects of their own life — to mix metaphors, that they captain their own ship, not that they are simply being tossed around by an uncontrollable ocean — are vastly better off than people whose default position is victimization, hurt, and a sense that life simply happens to them and they have no control over their response.” (emphasis mine)

Conservative commentator David Brooks appeared to agree in part with Yglesias, suggesting in the New York Times that liberals are less happy and more prone to depression because they “suffer from what you might call maladaptive sadness.”

This maladaptive sadness allegedly has three main features:

• A catastrophizing mentality whereby the infected routinely assumes the worst and makes catastrophic pronouncements to signal acknowledgment of the “brutalities of American life”;
• Extreme sensitivity to harm whereby the infected expresses constant fear of possible assault “by offensive and unsafe speech” such that she comes to rely upon “safe spaces, trigger warnings, cancellations, etc.”; and
• A culture of denunciation whereby the infected participates in a limitless arena of maximalist denunciation where “nobody knows who’s going to be denounced next. Everybody finds himself living in a climate of fear, and every emotionally healthy person is writing and talking from a defensive crouch.”

In the May issue of First Things, editor Rusty Reno further suggested that “one cause of rising teen suicide is late-model liberalism and its embrace of the cult of the victim.” (emphasis mine, again)

Farm kids didn’t have these problems.  They got up, milked the cows, fed the chickens, ate breakfast, cleaned up, and went to school.  They had a purpose – they contributed to their family’s well being.  They were too busy getting their hands dirty to contemplate their navels and wonder what they were going to do with their lives.  We have a whole generation of folks who had so much handed to them that they think it’s always going to be there and have no idea what to do with themselves.

So they find purposes to fulfill the empty void inside.  The put the locus of control in their lives outside of themselves, thus making them a victim to powers supposedly beyond their ken.  Nothing like feeling like you’re being tossed on a vast ocean of emotion to turn your head inside out.