Maybe the Crazy Leftists are Just Depressed!
New treatment practices have grown up over the last twenty-years, utilizing the concepts of "cognitive behavior therapy."
According to multiple scientific studies, the mental and emotional health of politically left leaning women has dropped the most and the fastest of any group of people over the last ten years.
This state of affairs is well known, having recently been noted in legacy mass media and scientific journals including:
The March 14th, 2024 Willey’s online paper, “Construction and validation of a scale for assessing critical social justice attitudes.”
The March 17th, 2024 PysPost story, “Study: “Woke” attitudes linked to anxiety, depression, and a lack of happiness.”
The May 8th, 2024 New York Times post, “Opinion | The Happiness Gap Between Left and Right Isn’t Closing.”
But while the above stories suggest that this is a new phenomena, the March 9th, 2023 After Babel post, “Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank First and Fastest,” notes that the situation was recognized and understood over two decades ago but only grew into a “pandemic” in universities after 2015.
The After Babel post follows closely the theories promoted by cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) which, as outlined in the 2017 American Psychological Association (APA) post, “What is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy” is:
…a form of psychological treatment that has been demonstrated to be effective for a range of problems including depression, anxiety disorders, alcohol and drug use problems, marital problems, eating disorders, and severe mental illness.
According to the APA post, CBT treatment usually involves efforts to change thinking patterns. These strategies might include:
Learning to recognize one’s distortions in thinking that are creating problems, and then to reevaluate them in light of reality.
Gaining a better understanding of the behavior and motivation of others.
Using problem-solving skills to cope with difficult situations.
Learning to develop a greater sense of confidence in one’s own abilities.
Facing one’s fears instead of avoiding them.
Using role playing to prepare for potentially problematic interactions with others.
Learning to calm one’s mind and relax one’s body.
CBT practitioners emphasize what is going on in the person’s current life, rather than what has led up to their difficulties. According to the APA post:
A certain amount of information about one’s history is needed, but the focus is primarily on moving forward in time to develop more effective ways of coping with life.
The general consensus of the CBT practitioners and the After Babel authors is that normal people, especially Liberal females, with the appropriate prompting from authority figures, develop internal thought processes and fears which overwhelm their ability to use reason and evidence to face and overcome challenges.
Essentially, according to CBT therapists, normal people start believing silly things when:
They believe they’re harmed by ideas, books, speakers, and words, which they consider to be "forms of violence," especially when they disagree with the ideas.
The begin to consider emotions, especially anxieties, as reliable guides to the reality of the outside world.
Perceive that society is split between "good people" who are all victims, and "bad people," who are all universally oppressors.
The solution according to the CBT therapists, is for the patient to:
Internally redefine themselves as "strong" and unharmed by contrary ideas. They need to understand that, while "sticks and stones" might break their bones," names will never hurt them.
Reject emotion as the only guide to what's going on in the outside world.
Embrace ongoing learning, using reason and evidence to understand the outside world, and learn from it to overcome challenges.
Reject false dichotomies unsupported by reason and evidence.
According to the After Babel post, crazy making beliefs such as a over-reliance on emotional triggers and the perception that “words,” especially words you disagree with, are forms of violence, were concepts initially popularized by leftist university professors looking to gain power in academia by “protecting the helpless,” essentially their students, from “uncomfortable” concepts they disagreed with.
The triggers and perceptions gained popularity after 2015 through distribution across social media channels via passive channel surfers.
So are the leftists simply crazy? Cognitive behavior therapists say yes!
I think conservatism overlaps with many practices and beliefs that are beneficial to self-development and growth. This is a huge advantage to collective sanity.
But I think many "crazy leftists" are trying to heal deep wounds without any tools to do so. And I think that's the trap. I believe it is not necessarily progressive dogma that drives their mental anguish, but it's the absense of tools to handle adversity that leaves them functionally helpless.
The problem is, being well adapted to a sick or self-destructive society isn't really a sign of health. So while many socially healthy conservatives may experience more sanity on average, it means little if more and more generations are turned into self-hating leftists by problems *actually outside their individual control*.