If you’ve ever had the misfortune to unwittingly sign up as a naïve adolescent for a sociology course at a mid-sized state university, waited too long to withdraw during the add/drop period, and so were forced to sit through a semester’s worth of frothing diatribes against the White Patriarchy delivered by a menopausal hippie divorcée with a neon-dyed bowl cut, as I have, these are the least surprising poll results in human history:
“The US polling, which was conducted as part of the 2022 American Family Survey, found that liberals were about 18 percentage points less likely to be “completely satisfied” with their “mental health” than conservatives. The problem seems to be particularly acute for liberal women, who registered the lowest levels of satisfaction with their lives and mental health.”
Parsing the data, sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox concluded that marriage and family status have a lot to do with the ideological and gender discrepancy: “Given that conservatives aged 18-55 are about 20 percentage points more likely to be married, as well as 18 percentage points more likely to be satisfied with their families, the lesson here is obvious. Marriage and family are strongly linked to happiness and to personal mental health in particular.”
Related: Coming Home: White Suburban Women Flocking Back to the GOP in Huge Numbers
Another study established a connection between religiosity, which conservatives possess in greater abundance, and more optimal mental health outcomes.
These assessments are probably at least partially accurate, but perhaps there’s a newer, independent variable worth exploring that’s sprung up in the last two years.
Over-educated liberal women were already way more neurotic than the general population before COVID-19 struck. But based on other polling data published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the nonstop Public Health© fearmongering likely worsened that demographic’s mental health, as “women are more likely to perceive the pandemic as a very serious health problem and to agree and comply with restraining measures.” Other studies, unsurprisingly, consistently find that liberals are more compliant with COVID protocols than conservatives, which would indicate that they take the Public Health© doomsday prophesizing more seriously.
Another study examining why conservatives are less frightened by COVID-19 found that part of the cause is exposure to different media sources than liberals.
It’s well-documented that fear drives anxiety. So it’s not a stretch to assume the highly orchestrated panic intentionally induced by the corporate media to drive Big Pharma profits and tighten social control is at least responsible, in part, for liberals’ wrecked mental health.
The causal connection between liberal ideology and poor psychological health is dose-dependent, meaning that, as one study found, the further an individual travels towards the “extreme” end of the liberal-conservative spectrum, the worse the mental health outcomes.
Again, these findings about people who spend an unhealthy amount of time on the internet surprise no one.
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