The Myth of the Mentally Ill Liberal

“Liberals are all mentally ill, no wonder they vote left!”

This is something I hear a lot; something to the effect of liberals (used interchangeably with “the left” and “democrats”) have higher rates of mental illness (or are all mentally ill).

As someone with an interest in the topic of mental health, this really piqued my research interest. I wonder, is this true at all? If it is, it is a chicken or the egg situation? Or do conservatives tend to choose not to seek treatment for perceived depression, anxiety or other symptoms? After all, you don’t have cancer if you never go to the doctor when your lymph nodes start swelling and you feel like garbage. Eventually, you’ll die, but you’ve never been diagnosed with cancer, so you won’t be a statistic.

I’ll break the post down like this: 1. I’ll talk about my experiences with mental health, 2. I’ll talk about treatments, 3. I’ll take about how the perception of mental health issues has changed over time, 4. I’ll determine if conservatives really have better mental health, or if they just don’t seek treatment.

Mental Health and Me!

Both of my parents have passed, so I’m taking a HIPAA pass and talking about their own issues.

My mom struggled immensely with anxiety, particularly after she lost literally everything during the recession. After she was diagnosed with cancer, she increasingly relied on Xanax to quell her feelings of anxiety. Having two kids, being from a generation of “don’t talk about feelings” and having zero time for self-care probably contributed to her prioritizing symptom management over condition treatment.

My dad was a whole other can of worms. During his teens and early 20’s, he abused stimulants and alcohol. This led to more than one episode of full psychosis, several stays in treatment and nearly ended in suicide. He found sobriety at Hazelden and was sober before I was born. He claims to have met Calvin Klein there and given him the idea for decorated overalls. This story is uncorroborated.

The substance abuse, in my dad’s case, was to mask the symptoms of something else. I always thought he was bipolar along with having psychotic depressive episodes. In his later years, he received a full diagnosis of schizophrenia with mania.

My dad died by suicide this fall, finally unable to cope with his own mind being against him. I hate that he did it, but I’m glad he’s at peace. RIP, dad.

He passed his depressive tendencies to me, but the anxiety I have stems from traumatic experiences. As a teenager and young adult I rarely experienced anxiety, and if I did it was for a darn good reason. SA and flipping over in a plane will definitely give you PTSD, though.

That’s my butt getting grabbed by the flight attendant.

Seeing my dad struggle with and having my own struggles, “mental illness” isn’t something I’m scared to talk about. I perceive a large shift in the last two decades of people learning that it’s okay to open up about things, because staying quiet about it just makes it worse. We need to talk about our problems to fix them. Otherwise, we internalize them and they grow even if we don’t nurture them. If only my garden was as self-perpetuating as depression!

More people in my family struggle with mental illness, but it’s not my place to tell their stories. In general, the societal shift to acceptance of what is inevitable for many of us is helping. The stigma is shrinking.

Just how much have things changed?

The Shift from Lobotomies to Therapy

Mentally ill people were never treated kindly throughout history.

Back in medieval times, mental illness was attributed to something supernatural, somatogenic or psychogenic. From lumen’s Abnormal Psychology piece, “Supernatural theories attribute mental illness to possession by evil or demonic spirits, displeasure of gods, eclipses, planetary gravitation, curses, and sin. Somatogenic theories (from the Greek word soma meaning body, therefore biological causes) identify disturbances in physical functioning resulting from either illness, genetic inheritance, brain damage, or imbalance. Psychogenic theories focus on traumatic or stressful experiences, maladaptive learned associations, and cognitions, or distorted perceptions”.

One of the first treatments for mental illness was called trephination. This involved drilling holes in the skull of the individual to release the demons. Here is the skull of someone who was trepanned.

Mental health treatment didn’t really get much better until the late 20th century. Some highlights of the awful shit that happened to people with mental illness over time:

• Henry Cotton, superintendent at NJ’s Trenton State Hospital from 1907-1930, believed that mental illness was caused by infection of the body. He first started pulling rotted teeth thinking the infection lived there, and when that failed, he assumed it was saliva. He then moved on to removing tonsils. I’m not a doctor, but I’m pretty sure salivary glands are what produce saliva. Not tonsils. These were his light cures. Quote, “…then he took it a step further, removing parts of stomachs, small intestines, appendixes, gallbladders, thyroid glands, and particularly parts of the colon — any place where it was thought infection could linger. Unsurprisingly, this did not prove to be a reliable cure and it carried a high mortality rate”.
• After discovering that high fevers reduce advanced syphilis symptoms, Julius Wagner-Jauregg started injecting the infected with malaria-infected blood. Just like Cotton’s cure, it had a high mortality rate (15%).
• Lobotomies involved removing the “bad parts” of the frontal lobe to in theory remove the mental illness causing parts. The first one was performed in 1935 and the last in 1967. They were often INCREDIBLY unsuccessful, resulting in seizures, vegetative states and even death. Read the story of Rosemary Kennedy if you’re interested.
• Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) started to be used around the same time, in 1938. This involves delivering targeted electroshocks to the brain, reducing in small seizures that effectively treat conditions like schizophernia. This is STILL used, and I will maintain that it’s what lead to my dad’s death. He struggled with incredible memory loss and dementia-like symptoms after received an assload of ECT in St. Cloud. He signed his last birthday card to my kid’s as “Uncle Jeff”, not Grandpa. More on ECT here.

More modern treatments include a variety of SSRIs, SNRIs, and anti-psychotic meds like Seroquel. These work for most people and are safer than having a hole drilled in the head or electricity applied to the brain. They come with side effects, though. Some common ones are “greying out”, where the mood stabilizing effects work so well that the patient literally becomes apathetic to everything, withdrawal, weight gain, and “snowing”. Snowing is when the sedative effects of drugs used to treat mania works so well that the patient is effectively comatose.

I take Effexor XR. It’s highly effective, and my dad took it as well. The problem is, for people with comorbidities like bipolar or schizophrenia, they may not remember to take their meds. Withdrawal from Effexor can start if you miss a dose by hours. I missed a dose precisely once, and I couldn’t figure out why I went from fine to thinking the world was crumbling around me in the span of 6 hours. It’s such an ingrained fear now that when I was leaving the burning fuselage of a plane, I HAD to grab my backpack for fear I couldn’t get the med in Canada in time. The flight attendant made me drop it, so after everyone else was released I had to go back into the Dr. to get some meds. I was out until 2am in the morning figuring it out but it’s better than ending up in the ER with seratonin sickness.

The most effect treatments, in my opinion, always include therapy. For things like depression and anxiety, traditional therapies like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) are effective. This is essentially “talk therapy”. After a sexual assault in the military, I received Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) which involves addressing the intrusive thoughts caused by PTSD with a structured framework.

For more in-depth treatment for things like C-PTSD and PTSD, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is highly successful. This involves talking through trauma while rapidly looking between two lights or focusing on buzzers in opposite hands. The treatment involves “connecting” the two halves of the brain, allowing for reprocessing of the trauma and desensitizing. I’m currently in EMDR for the combo of SA, plane crash, and dad’s death.

Now that we have talked history, let’s talk about perceptions.

The Mental Health Stigma

The world has a very “We don’t talk about Bruno” attitude when it comes to our mental health.

My dad’s siblings are generally pretty open, but no one told me about my dad’s struggles with mental illness until I was much, much older. It was like an invisible monster following him around that only he could see, and I couldn’t understand because there was no word for it.

The American Psychological Association released findings in September 2025 about the remaining stigma with mental health. Their findings are this: Most people say there is no shame in Mental Illness, but still, 35% of people reported that they’d view someone differently if they knew they had a mental health condition.

This is echoed by another study by Joseph S. Deluca and Phillip T. Yanos in 2016. Their findings:

The results of this study indicated significant relationships between endorsements of self-reported conservatism and RWA to negative stereotypes and social distance in relation to mental illness. Individuals with ‘High RWA’ were more likely to see individuals with mental illness as dangerous and unpredictable, and less willing to want to socially associate with individuals with mental illness. These results remained statistically significant even when controlling for other factors that consistently predict mental health stigma. Negative stereotypes also partially mediated individuals with RWA’s significant relationship to social distance.

I used my NYU library to get access to the full report, which included something else interesting: Knowing and loving someone with mental illness increases the chances that they’ll view a mental illness as something that can be treated and recovered from.

I’ll admit, once I found out the severity of my dad’s mental health struggles I did go through a bit of a phase where I wasn’t sure what to think about my relationship with him. Was I safe with him growing up? My mom had already passed, but I wish I could have asked her if she knew, and if she did, if she felt safe leaving us with him? There were times growing up I was scared of my dad. I had always assumed I was being oversensitive, but finding out the truth shattered some of the foundational feelings of security I had built up. I understood why my mom fought so hard to keep me from moving in with him when she kicked me out at 16.

After some time to process, I was able to reconcile things and accept my dad how he was. It still took time and deliberate effort to get there.

With more than a third of the population admitting to feeling differently about someone with mental illness, is it any wonder people may try to hide theirs? That’s without even considering how the person themselves may perceive their own mental illness as “weakness”. As I stated earlier, you don’t have something if you don’t get diagnosed with it.

Now, onto the numbers of liberals vs. conservative diagnosis rates.

Do Conservatives Just Not Get Diagnosed?

My hypothesis is that conservatives, because they’re more likely to view mental health with a stigmatized lens, just don’t go to the doctor to get treatment for their symptoms.

In a research report titled Mental Health and Mental Health Care Utilization Across Political Affiliation in US Adults, released by Dr. Catherine K. Ettman, Dr. C. Ross Hatton, et. al in 2025, surveys were done to screen for depression and results were separated by political party identification. The results were then controlled for sex, race and ethnicity, age, education, household income, home ownership, parent status, marital status, health insurance, metropolitan status, region, and self-rated overall health. 101 adults were excluded who had missing data for either the outcome (PHQ-9) or any covariates, resulting in a final total sample size of 2365 adults. The survey weights were benchmarked to the Current Population Survey to make our findings nationally representative, and we present both unadjusted and adjusted findings. Analyses were conducted from October 2022 to February 2023 using Stata version 18.

The nitty gritty of this study is only available through an Institutional Library. If you’d like a copy of this report or any other that isn’t publicly available, please send me a comment in the “Contact Me” form so I can send it to you!

Here is the positive depression screening rate by party:

And the number who felt they had unmet mental health needs by political party:

The summary:

This study yielded 3 primary findings. First, we found that the prevalence of depressive symptoms did not differ significantly by partisan affiliation in either adjusted or unadjusted models. Second, we documented high levels of unmet need for mental health services across all political parties. Third, the prevalence of unmet need was significantly higher among Republicans.

Another study called “Do conservatives really have better mental well-being than liberals?” by Brian F. Schaffner, Thomas Hershewe, et al, found that Conservatives are more likely to report better “mental health” than liberals, but not a better overall mood. Quote:

“While conservatives report significantly better mental health than liberals, there is no difference between how the two sides report their overall mood. Only conservatives give significantly different responses when prompted with the “mental health” terminology compared to “overall mood”. Mental health and overall mood are not perfect synonyms, thus it may be true that conservatives have better mental health than liberals, but perform no better than liberals when it comes to overall mood”.

I find this study difficult to interpret, as I directly tie my mental health to overall mood. If I’m depressed, my mood is low. If I’m anxious, my mood is “HOLY SHIT THE SKY IS FALLING” (also not a good mood).

Research by Jason Schnittiker “…confirms that conservative political ideology correlates with a decreased likelihood of mental health service utilization, even after controlling for relevant demographic variables”. There are good reasons to be found though.

These findings are repeated in another study published in 2025, titled “Partisanship and Mental Health: Help Seeking and Institutional Trust in a Polarized Country” by Jeffrey Lyons, Ellen J. Shafer, et al. The results:

The findings indicate Republicans are less likely than Democrats to report seeking help for mental health and are less trusting of institutions that supply mental health information. Trust in state health departments is moderated by the partisanship of the state the respondent lives in; Republicans are more trusting of state health departments in states that are governed by Republicans than in states governed by Democrats.

The first outlined by Psychology Today is that conservatives tend to value self-reliance more than liberals. NYU’s Jonathan Haidt’s research finds that this emphasis creates an environment where seeking help is more likely to be viewed as weakness than as strength. I relate to this – I would rather break open a pickle jar with a hammer than ask for help opening it.

The second factor is another good one – mental health professionals do tend to be more liberal. Conservatives may not feel represented or understood by liberal counselors, and liberal counselors may not know how to approach the feelings a conservative patient is facing. We need more conservative counselors!

The third factor is religious beliefs. Conservatives tend to have stronger religious beliefs, leading them to often choose to confide in and seek help from clergy rather than mental health professionals. One study found that “…although 71 percent of clergy reported spending significant time counseling congregants with mental health concerns, only 22 percent had received formal training in recognizing mental illness“. I grew up religious – I know the drive to approach your clergy with problems. I spent mandatory time in the confessional booth telling the priest about my sins and struggles as a kid. “Anonymously”, of course.

In short, the data does seem to show that conservatives are less likely to seek therapy. The reasons are diverse and real, but the bottom line is: there is a correlation. The hypothesis seems to hold.

Conclusion

Mental health in this country has come a long way from trepanning and lobotomizing the sufferers. We still have a long way to go, though, when it comes to stigma and accepting each other and ourselves for who we are. We don’t stigmatize someone for seeking cancer treatment, so why do we do it for people seeking mental health services?

Thanks for reading!

P.s. this will be guaranteed post 1/3 for this week, trying out the new schedule.