“On the Holmes Front” with Frank Holmes
After Donald Trump won the 2024 election, America saw liberal voters have a breakdown on a national level.
The trend of online videos — shot mostly by liberal women — showed the anti-Trump crowd shouting curse words, emitting primal screams of rage, or cutting off all their hair like a member of the Manson Family.
If it looked like a nationwide mental health disorder, you may be right.
A survey shows liberal women are the group most likely to suffer from depression and mental illness… and are more than 10 times likely to have a diagnosis for mental health disorders than some conservative men.
A strong majority—56.3 percent—of liberal white women between the ages of 18 and 29 had actually been diagnosed by a doctor with a mental health disorder. That’s more than twice as high as conservative women the same age (27.3 percent).
Generally, younger people, liberals, and women had higher levels of depression and other psychological problems than older people, conservatives, and men.
Only 4.5 percent of conservative men had received a psychological diagnosis…10 points lower than liberal men of the same age, according to an analysis of the 2020 Pew American Trends Panel study.
Tucker Carlson discussed the results on his Fox News show in 2021.
“A survey from last March shows 64% of white Americans that identify as liberal or very liberal has has been diagnosed with an actual mental disorder,” said Carlson.
A survey from last March shows 64% of white Americans that identify as liberal or very liberal has has been diagnosed with a mental disorder. pic.twitter.com/jEVT3isRwr
— The Dirty Truth (Josh) (@AKA_RealDirty) April 27, 2021
It would be one thing if this were a stand-alone poll…but the results have held steady for more than 50 years.
An expert found the same trend in a 2020 study published in Mankind Quarterly by Emil O. W. Kirkegaard of the Ulster Institute for Social Research.
He found “especially high rates” of mental illness “for the ‘extremely liberal’ group” of people.
His analysis of all the survey “results found that extreme liberals had a 150% increased rate of mental illness compared to moderates,” wrote the other Kirkegaard. “The finding of increased mental illness among left-wingers is congruent with numerous findings based on related constructs, such as positive relationships between conservatism, religiousness and health in general.”
“There is a strongly elevated risk for mental illness among the extreme liberals (+150%), a small increase among the liberals and slightly liberals (+29 to 32%), and somewhat lower rates among conservatives and extreme conservatives (-17 to 24%).”
Kirkegaard, E. O. (2020).… pic.twitter.com/K2AQhpwEm9
— Alexander (@datepsych) July 16, 2024
Another set of experts found the same results after looking at each class of high school seniors for 13 straight years.
A team of four researchers in the Department of Epidemiology at the prestigious Columbia University looked at young people between 2005 to 2018 and analyzed their mental health after sorting them for their political beliefs, sex, and parental education.
They found that every group of young people felt worse after 2010—when graduates realized they had to face the Great Recession and the slow-as-molasses recovery of the Obama-Biden economy—but liberals came out worst.
“Trends in adolescent internalizing symptoms diverged by political beliefs, sex, and parental education over time, with female liberal adolescents experiencing the largest increases in depressive symptoms,” especially if their parents had a low educational level, they concluded.
Like typical liberals, they tried to blame the problem on Donald Trump.
They said Trump’s trouncing of Hillary Clinton in 2016 made Democrats feel down. “Liberal adolescents may have therefore experienced alienation within a growing conservative political climate,” the Columbia authors wrote.
That’s a plausible-sounding explanation…until you realize the same trends have held true since before Donald Trump every had a thought about running for president.
Yet another set of researchers scanned the answers that people of all ages gave to World Values Survey during the 33 years between 1981 and 2014.
They also looked at the answered provided by “over 270,000 individuals from 92 countries surveyed in the last 40 years.” They found conservatives said they felt happier than liberals in 65 percent of those countries.
“Liberals were happier than conservatives in only 5 out of 92 countries and never in the United States,” the authors wrote.
Donald Trump isn’t president of all 92 countries—and he wasn’t president of any country in 2014.
Polls show Republicans have been about 10 points more likely than Democrats to say they are happy since the year the first year researchers collected Americans’ answers in the General Social Survey…in 1972.
People who study psychological data have known for decades that liberals are more likely to go a little crazy now and then than conservatives.
Arthur Brooks, a Ph.D. who has spent his career studying what makes people happy, wrote about it “A Formula for Happiness” in The New York Times in December 2013…and a decade later, he looked back at the new statistics.
In 2013, “only one out of five liberal men say they feel very happy”…but that was 10 years ago.
Since then, liberal women have shot into the lead for mental health disorders.
“White liberal women under 30 have almost a six in 10 chance of having been diagnosed with a mental illness,” said Brooks. “There’s a group that’s really struggling, and it’s a pity, because it’s not good for them, not good for society.”
6/10 liberal women are diagnosed with a mental illness
Making them the most unhappy group in America statistically pic.twitter.com/Njpg958tMm
— E (@ElijahSchaffer) December 22, 2024
At least one top-level scholar has crunched the numbers and thinks he has the answer: Liberals believe in a hopeless ideology that leaves them lonely and miserable.
“Conservatives are more likely to be patriotic and religious. They are more likely to be (happily) married and less likely to divorce. Religiosity, in turn, correlates with greater subjective and objective well-being (here, here, here). So does patriotism. So does marriage,” wrote Columbia University sociology professor Musa al-Gharbi in the American Affairs Journal last March.“Consequently, some have argued that the apparent psychological benefit of conservatism actually comes from feeling deeper connections with one’s country, one’s family, and the Divine.”
So, the next time a rainbow-haired socialist with xe/xir pronouns and a made-up gender screams at you, say a little prayer. Hope they find patriotism, Jesus, and a loving member of the opposite sex who can love them, heal them, and give them something greater and more abiding than political radicalism as the basis of their life,
Their politics will fail them even more than it failed our country the last four years. Americans don’t need to agree on every issue, but our country needs all its citizens to be mentally stable and live in reality. If Donald Trump does that, it will be one of the greatest legacies of his second term.