I listened to the podcast that led me to the Atheist for Liberty website. The first time I heard Melissa Chen she spoke on the history of the Enlightenment, and how we have not completed that project, that revolution. It was an excellent speech. Since then, she has shown her conservative crazy side. In this interview, she throws out stats from a Pew Research poll, that, she concludes, indicates liberals are 2 or 3 times more likely to be nut-jobs.
Podcasts usually don’t do references, so I go looking, and the first red-flag is that it’s all over conservative websites, this talking point, but most of them don’t link to it. But I persist. The actual question that was asked was, “Has a doctor or mental health provider EVER told you that you have a mental health condition?” There are so many factors that are not filtered out of that question.
Also a good point. If you read any articles that cite this, or listen to the podcast, you’d see how quickly they slide to diagnosing large swaths of people.
There is quite a bit of research on the subject, and it does point to liberals being more mentally ill.
It has been claimed that left-wingers or liberals (US sense) tend to more often suffer from mental illness than right-wingers or conservatives. This potential link was investigated using the General Social Survey cumulative cross-sectional dataset (1972-2018). A search of the available variables resulted in 5 items measuring one’s own mental illness (e.g., ”Do you have any emotional or mental disability?”). All of these items were weakly associated with left-wing political ideology as measured by self-report, with especially high rates seen for the “extremely liberal” group. These results mostly held up in regressions that adjusted for age, sex, and race.
Extreme liberals are really messed up; which is obvious to anybody who has dealt with them
For the variable with the most data (n = 11,338), the difference in the mental illness measure between “extremely liberal” and “extremely conservative” was 0.39 d. Temporal analysis showed that the relationship between mental illness, happiness, and political ideology has existed in the GSS data since the 1970s and still existed in the 2010s. Within-study meta-analysis of all the results found that extreme liberals had a 150% increased rate of mental illness compared to moderates. 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.
This kind of conclusion is equating the number of people reporting mental issues with a degree of mental illness. That’s completely wrong. On top of that, the extreme differences in ideology is interpreted as the other being “crazy”. That’s normal human psychology, but also useless as data about mental illness.
Finally, and most important, the bottom line claim here is that crazy people are winning elections, polling very well on issues, and developing policies that help people. Is it possible that 70 million people are on the same crazy train?
First, your phrasing is wrong. Liberals are not necessarily more mentally ill. They may have depression, bipolar, an eating disorder, anxiety, PTSD or another, but this does not classify them as mentally ill.
Secondly, I question your source. Researchgate? Mankind Quarterly (found in the heading)? Please. That is not a reliable source. Give us something like the APA or something far more trustworthy. Keep in mind, my degree is in Psychology, so it better be good and reliable source or you’re not going to convince me. The source you cited isn’t reliable.
This “study” is a classic misunderstanding of what a source is. The data is data, but it wasn’t collected with a methodology that fit the study. This affects the questions, the selected population, how they are asked, etc. The “study” that"uses" this data is about as meaningful as assigning numbers to letters and rearranging them to determine the date on the apocalypse.
If you take data and start running counts on it, rearranging it, eventually you will come up with sets and percentages that appear to be a correlation.
And let’s not forget the suicide rate and addictions to pain killers that has swept through working class middle age men. Conservatives love to point to this as some kind of neglect of the salt of the earth, the people who built the country, but that narrative is conveniently ignored while counting suburban women with an opinion.
The study was compiled from the GSS, which is used by many “experts”. On top of that, Lausten’s link comes from Pew Research findings that showed the same: liberals report more mental illness.
You didn’t read, or you are willfully ignoring my post about how to use sociological data. It doesn’t require a degree to understand this. Just read the questions again, “have you EVER been told” you have a mental condition. Pew put those caps in. So, the person answering the question could have been told they were depressed by a school counselor in 7th grade, or they came back from a tour in Iraq and had PTSD, you have no idea.
Very important, the person has to have been self-aware enough to get past the stigma of going to a mental health provider. Thus my comment on Oxycontin deaths, those people would not have checked that box.
I don’t think you understand what I’m saying. I’m saying it doesn’t mean they are nutso-fago in which they need to be institutionalized. While their affect maybe sad or what have you, they present themselves in everyday life as normal as you or anyone on this forum. Depression is the common cold of mental health, as I was taught in my psychology classes. Liberals do report it more because the stigma isn’t there for liberals, like it is for the Right wingers. It does not mean they cannot function in society. Now the Right wingers obviously cannot function well in society, because they have the guns and they attempted a coup. After all of that, you’re saying Liberals are crazy? Crazy is not the word you want for liberals.
This is a topic worth pursuing, but I do actually have other things to do. Psychology Today took the study seriously enough to include it in an article, and they did what peer review should do, look at other similar studies. That’s the main mistake oneguy is making, taking a cut and paste conclusion that he doesn’t understand, remembering some conversation he had years ago with a “crazy liberal” and considering his bias confirmed by data.
Here’s the article, and some quotes:
Kirkegaard suggested that the relationship between mental health and ideology might reflect that conservatives tend to be more religious, and being religious is associated with health benefits (Koenig, 2012), while admitting that a cross-sectional survey is not very informative regarding causality.
For example, one study (Gerber et al., 2009), using data from three nationally representative datasets, found that neuroticism was more strongly related to economic than social liberalism. That is, people who were higher in neuroticism tended to hold left-liberal positions on economic issues such as higher taxes and government funding for healthcare more strongly than they did on social issues such as abortion and gay rights.
Gerber also concludes: That is, highly neurotic individuals might be more worried about and feel guilttoward the less fortunate; alternatively, they could be more worried about their own ability to cope with adverse economic circumstances, such as having inadequate health insurance, and therefore support social welfare out of self-interest. And of course, it may be a combination of both.
Finally, let’s remember to treat mentally ill people with compassion regardless of their ideology.
I have yet to see a conservative take personal responsibility. Let’s take this pandemic as an example. Liberals listen to the scientists. Conservatives are the one’s refusing to wear masks, social distance, and get vaccinated, preferring to spread the virus and let it mutate, killing themselves and taking others with them. There’s no middle ground on some things.
