“We are extremely divided, and we’re polarized in a way that we are generally not in our history,” said Mark Caleb Smith, dean of the School of Arts and Humanities at Cedarville University.
Local experts in mental health, political science and neuropsychology told the Dayton Daily News that elections can be a difficult time for mental health as strongly held beliefs can be challenged by deep political divides.
About 43% of adults recently surveyed in an election survey said they felt more anxious than they did the previous year, up from 37% in 2023 and 32% in 2022, according to a poll from the American Psychiatric Association.
Of the adults who reported feeling anxious, the upcoming election played a large role in those feelings.
About 70% of those adults are particularly anxious about current events, the poll said. About 77% reported being anxious about the economy, 73% about the 2024 U.S. election, and 69% about gun violence.
An ‘extremely divided’ nation
Increasing tensions are likely to have risen from the country’s deep political divide, the likes of which have not been seen in decades.
Political surveys, which have been collected for the past 80-90 years, have not seen the kind of division that is currently being faced between Americans right now, Smith said, who is also the director of the Center for Political Studies and a professor of political science at Cedarville University.
“I think the closest we come to the kind of division we are at right now is probably in the late 1960s, which was also an era of political violence and a lot of conflict and strife in the country,” said Smith. “I think the division is there, and it’s significant.”
Smith doesn’t think the recent assassination attempt will have much of an effect on the political divide in the country, he said, such as by unifying the country.
“For a day or two, we heard discussions from the campaigns about putting forward a more unified message, a more positive message, but I think that’s probably going to be a pretty short-term promise,” Smith said.
He also doesn’t see the assassination attempt making the divide much worse between Americans.
If the shooter had purely political motives, it could have created more problems between people, he said, but law enforcement has yet to uncover a motive for the shooter.
The FBI identified the shooter as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, who had few friends, an apparently thin social media footprint and no hints of strong political beliefs that would suggest a motive for an attempted assassination, the AP reported.
Crooks was registered as a Republican in Pennsylvania, but federal campaign finance reports also show he gave $15 to a progressive political action committee on Jan. 20, 2021, the day Democratic President Joe Biden was sworn into office, according to the AP.
If the assassination attempt had a different outcome, the answer as to what kind of impact it would have had on the political divide could be different, Smith said.
Taking a break
Earlier polls this year showed more than a third of Americans felt election season added stress and anxiety to their lives.
One survey found 40% of Americans report feeling “depressed and/or anxious” around the election season, according to the GeneSight Mental Health Monitor, a nationwide survey from Myriad Genetics, Inc., which provides genetic testing.
“I think that there’s increased anxiety compared to previous years,” Smith said.
In a Yahoo News survey, 40% of the people surveyed said they weren’t feeling anxious about the upcoming election, but another 55% reported taking a variety of actions to cope with election stress, such as volunteering for a political campaign or avoiding all or some election-related news.
It can be difficult to step away from constantly refreshing the web for new information or letting a 24-hour news station rash the same information for fear of missing out on a new piece of information.
But finding a way to take a break from the big news of the moment may be what’s needed to protect your peace, mental health experts say.
Credit: NYT
Credit: NYT
“What happens when we expose ourselves to this nonstop cycle of news coverage is it can become very distressing. We can find ourselves with increased anxiety and increased fear,” said Tina Rezash Rogal of Montgomery County Alcohol, Drug Addiction and Mental Health Services.
It can also keep people from doing other activities that may help alleviate some of that stress.
“When we’re sitting in front of a 24-hour news channel watching television all day long, we’re not doing the other things that we know are beneficial to our mental health,” Rezash Rogal said.
Getting outdoors, exercising and spending time with friends and family can all be helpful to mental health and to countering the added stress from major, national events, she said.
Grief, chronic stress can come from election seasons
Part of what makes elections, particularly presidential elections, such a big stressor is that politics can include strongly held, inherent beliefs, which could be challenged or impacted by the outcome of an election.
If people are feeling very anxious due to the election, they may even go through stages of grief at the outcome of the election or experience chronic stress from it, a local expert in neuropsychology said.
“There are certain things that you just cannot reconcile,” said Dr. Fadi Tayim, director of the Brain Mapping Center at the Premier Health Clinical Neuroscience Institute.
This can also lead to cognitive dissonance, which is a psychological concept describing when someone holds conflicting beliefs or when their behaviors don’t match their beliefs or values, according to the Cleveland Clinic.
Credit: NYT
Credit: NYT
“In the presence of a stressor, if you cannot change the situation―in this case, the outcome of an election― then the only viable option to cope is to accept,” Tayim said.
If the outcome of an election ends up with a political situation conflicting with people’s core values and deeply held beliefs, this can become a source of chronic stress that they may not be able to get past, he said.
This can even lead to a type of chronic post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD), as a chronic exposure to a stressor that you can’t change is one of the criteria for CPTSD, he said.
“There is actually a chronic PTSD that can be associated with forcing someone to do something that is against their inherent belief system,” Tayim said.
Social media is a driving force for division, anxiety
There is no getting away from the role social media plays in raising political tensions.
“I don’t think there’s any question that social media is one of the driving forces of this,” Smith said in regard to the political divide in the U.S.
There are a lot of reasons for this, he said.
“One is that the information that people have access to on social media is very limited and curated,” Smith said. “And so, it’s most likely to confirm their point of view as opposed to challenge them.”
Social media can lead people to making decisions based on limited, and sometimes poor, information that was most likely communicated in a way to elicit an emotional response, he said.
“People are dealing with limited information that’s emotionally charged,” Smith said.
Social media, in and of itself, also creates anxiety, he said.
“It individualizes us in a lot of unhealthy ways, I think, and it disconnects us from people and relationships too easily,” Smith said.
Easing the political divide
There may be little hope to finding an easy way out of the political divide in the U.S., but people can start with recognizing how it benefits politicians, Smith said.
“Generally, our political leaders have an interest in creating that anxiety because the more anxious their voters are, the more loyal they’re going to be, the more likely they are to donate their time and their money and their energy to the candidate under the campaign, and the less likely they are to consider alternative points of view,” Smith said.
“I think that people need to begin with that understanding that maybe some of my anxiety is fueled by my leaders, and I have to take a step back and critically evaluate them based on that,” Smith said.
It may also help people to find another source of hope on which to lean.
“At least for me as a person of faith, I don’t look at every election as the end of the world. I don’t look at every election as kind of the end of America, or that the stakes are so high that we can’t recover from whatever happens in November,” Smith said.
Finding a “bigger perspective” can help, he said, but it’s still a tough political environment.
“If you have a bigger perspective and have somewhere to rest your faith that’s a little bit broader than just kind of campaigns and elections, I think that helps,” Smith said.
How to get help
If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988 or visit 988Lifeline.org for 24/7, confidential support.
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