“Being a progressive activist made me miserable”
My personal reflection on the left-right mental health gap is live at the Boston Globe
My anxiety, depression, and PTSD symptoms were at their worst when I was most invested in the left-wing ideology I’d built my professional and social life around. That all changed in late 2020, when I quit my job after months of growing disillusionment. I “graduated” from therapy at that point, and over the following years, my mental health kept improving, despite fluctuating income and the eventual loss of formerly close connections.
As my political views and social networks shifted, my emotional trajectory tracked with longstanding research showing that the further left a person’s political views lean, the more likely they are to be diagnosed with certain kinds of mental or emotional distress.
One of the reasons I started this Substack is because I am grieved by how Groupthink, Inc. manufactures and popularizes distorted ideas that make its participants and supporters miserable. By relying on distorted, emotionally manipulative rhetoric spread through clicktivist rituals and mass media campaigns, the industry I used to work in drives people to despair (as seen in disparate rates of mental illness) and destruction (as seen in recurring riots like the ones currently blazing through LA and elsewhere). Neither of these responses help people get or stay free.
I’ll have more to say on all of that in the next few days, but in the meantime, I hope you find this deep-dive into the mental health costs of progressive activism useful. Check it out on bostonglobe.com!
—Sabrina