The world of politics is stressing Americans out and may be negatively impacting their health, according to findings from a new study published in PLOS One. An analysis of several nationally representative surveys suggests that these negative health effects persisted during Donald Trump’s four-year presidency and worsened with the 2020 presidential election.
It is not hard to imagine that politics can negatively impact well-being. Americans report feeling especially stressed during election season, and some even report receiving online harassment due to their political views. Scholars call politics a “chronic stressor” that weaves its way into the news, social media, and popular culture.
Scholar Kevin B. Smith (@nivek_htims) wondered whether the increased polarization of American politics may have exacerbated this issue. The researcher conducted a series of studies to investigate whether politics is impacting US public health on a large scale, examining national samples of Americans across changing political seasons.
“There have been a number of surveys indicating that people saw politics as a significant source of stress in their lives, and even anecdotal evidence that therapists were seeing more people who were attributing some part of a mental health issue to politics,” said Smith, the Leland and Dorothy Chair of Arts and Sciences at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. “That made me curious about whether attention to and engagement in politics could actually be pathological, i.e. whether it could be responsible for negatively affecting people’s emotional, social and even physical health.”
Health surveys were administered to nationally representative samples of Americans at three different time points. The 32-item surveys measured the physical, psychological, and social health impact of political engagement and were validated by Smith and his colleagues in a previous study. The surveys addressed factors like loss of sleep, stress, and suicidal thoughts.
A first health survey was distributed to 800 Americans in March 2017, a few months after Trump was elected as president. The data revealed that about 40% of Americans said that politics was a significant source of stress in their lives. Taking into account the US population at that time, the researchers estimated that 94 million Americans likely feel that politics contributes to their stress.
The second health survey was distributed about two weeks before President Biden was elected president in November 2020. When comparing these responses to the 2017 data, it appeared that the negative health consequences of politics were more or less stable over time. However, three items were endorsed more frequently, with more Americans saying that politics was causing them fatigue, creating problems with extended family, and unduly occupying their thoughts more.
A follow-up survey was then distributed to the same 2020 sample, two weeks later, once Biden was elected. This time, it was found that endorsement for eight of the items increased significantly when compared to the pre-election survey. Respondents were “more stressed because of politics, more likely to be depressed because a favored candidate lost, were feeling more fatigued because of politics, were more likely to report losing sleep because of politics, and were more likely to say politics had harmed their physical health generally.”
Endorsement decreased for two of the items, with Americans being less likely to feel that they spent too much time on political websites or that their political views were causing problems with immediate family.
The findings suggest that many Americans consider politics to be a source of strain on their mental and physical health. In some cases, the strain was extreme, with about 5% of participants reporting suicidal thoughts related to politics — which would equate to an estimated 12 million Americans. Since the health consequences attributed to politics appeared relatively stable between 2017 and 2019, this suggests that the effects were not driven by an unpopular candidate winning the presidency, nor were they alleviated when Trump left the office in 2020.
“I want to make very clear I’m not a clinician and I’m not trying to do any armchair psychoanalysis of the nation, but what the study indicates is that lots of American adults see politics as having a pretty negative affect on different areas of their health,” Smith told PsyPost. “Huge numbers — tens of millions — of American adults attribute a range of psychological, social and even physical health maladies to politics. If the study’s estimates are anywhere in the correct ballpark, it suggests our current political environment is, quite literally, not particularly healthy.”
However, “there simply has not been a lot of research in this area, so we’re still trying to figure out exactly what’s going on,” Smith noted. “Big question to still be resolved is causality. The study is correlational, i.e. it proves that health and politics are correlated, not that the latter causes reductions in the former. We think we understand a mechanism that could make that relationship causal (i.e. politics is a chronic stressor, and chronic stressors are known to cause a range of health problems), but more study is need to assess whether that causal link does indeed operate the way we think it does.”
He also noted that strategies to avoid these public health consequences are tricky, since reducing public exposure to politics can threaten democracy. One possible avenue might be to increase public knowledge of the political system, Smith wrote in his study, since research suggests that being informed may help combat the negative health costs of politics.
“A healthy democracy requires informed, interested and engaged citizens,” he explained. “So how can we achieve that without people seeing politics as something that takes a toll on their health? I haven’t got a super good answer to that question, and think it is important enough to justify a big future research effort.”
The study, “Politics is making us sick: The negative impact of political engagement on public health during the Trump administration”, was authored by Kevin B. Smith.