Recent reports cite mental health professionals noting an increase in people seeking help for anxiety and depression since Donald Trump’s election:
The American Psychological Association has recorded a rise in anxiety in the Trump era, with a five per cent increase (52 to 57 per cent) in politically induced stress levels over a six-month period before, during and after the 2016 election. Overall, stress levels were the highest they’ve been in a decade, according to the APA.
In an online survey in February 2017, two-thirds of Americans — including most Democrats as well as most Republicans — said they were stressed about the future of the nation. Most of the more than 3,500 people polled blamed the extreme political polarization for their anxiety. There was a strong correlation between stress levels and electronic news consumption.
I agree that we are living in anxiety inducing times, and I have great empathy for young people who feel that our future is growing more precarious by the day. It is right now.
But this is not about Trump. The habits and policies that have created our current strife have been unfolding for decades and across political parties of all stripes.
No doubt, Trump represents the unvarnished ugly of what humans can be, and having him as the leader of the free world is unsettling, to say the least. But to make meaningful improvements from here, we need to see unvarnished ugly so that we can admit, repent, reform and recover.
Those who thought the election of Barack Obama had somehow fixed our self-destructive status quo were painfully naive, perhaps hoping for an easy way out. The change we need to make here is big, not painless, and it must be driven by our individual action, not passive observation.
Positive steps and progress are the antidote to anxiety and fear. In this sense Trump offers a powerful inverse mentor and catalyst. We can use it.
;
