I’m left wondering from all of the political threads of late if there is any correlation between politics of a particular persuasion and a greater incidence of mental health problems.

It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if right wingers had more problems, but that is my left wing prejudice – I would love to know if there was any evidence of this?

I recommend reading the book Mindset by Carol Dwek – makes a really interesting case where it becomes abundantly clear that liberals have growth mindsets, and conservatives have fixed mindsets.

BTW, the book makes a clear case that growth good, fixed bad.

I’m left wondering why people feel the need to pigeon hole everything.

I always thought people who are right wing inclined are people with limited ability for empathy.

Not that I know of. Never heard of any correlation. You will get a concentration of people with personality disorders in politics same as you do in top level business and alcoholism seems to be an issue but mental health? I don’t think so and the issues I raise are not the prerogative of any one side

Intelligent people tend to have higher rates of mental health issues, and also tend to vote further left.

There was a study done that showed thickos were more likely to be prejudiced and vote right. So perhaps righties are just that, thick/unable to cope with a complex world without raging.

The True Believer by Eric Hoffer is again, a good start, into the minds of people that partake in right or leftwing mass movements.

It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if right wingers had more problems,

You’re confusing ‘right wingers’ with ‘vocal right wingers’. Most right-wingers are ‘shy’.

It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if right wingers had more problems, but that is my left wing prejudice – I would love to know if there was any evidence of this?

Well, that’s always possible, but perhaps if you spent some time examining the behaviour of Stalin, Pol Pot, Kim Il Jun, Mao Tse Tung and Abimael Guzmán, among many others, you might then want to examine your own ‘left wing prejudice’.
Apart from one particular Austrian, an Italian, and the Japanese military-industrial complex, I can’t think of too many right-wing individuals who’ve slaughtered as many innocent people as those above have in the name of left-wing/communist ideology.

We need a chart of how many have been killed by left vs right wingers.

And seriously, what rotor stern said.

Well that can’t be right, all lefties are snowflakes

OP whats your definition of mental health problems??

The problem with this is trying to fit extremists into the one dimensional political chart, without considering the possibility that it wraps. The question is whether any of those you name were actually more left wing in reality than a certain leader of a socialist party who you seem to put at the other end of the political spectrum.

I suspect it might be more useful to look at people who aren’t fascist dictators.

FWIW my shift to the left politically has coincided with mental health issues.

To the OP I did my dissertation (20+ years ago) on a similar topic, i.e. Do your political views influence your physical and mental health. All the research at the time suggested that your intelligence and / or a predilection to an artistic / creative temptement where correlated, but of course that does not mean causation or suggest a political leaning. However, I think it’s a truism that less intelligent / more ignorant people are potentially less self aware and less self doubting & critical and therefore possibly happier. At the time it was called the ‘pig in shit’ theory. More recently there’s been some fascinating research on mental illness such as bi-polar and artisticness / creativity. There definitely appears to be a correlation, but causation and which way it works is ambiguous

I think it’s fair to say that anyone involved in politics…how can I put this..is not quite right in the head.

Intelligent people tend to have higher rates of mental health issues, and also tend to vote further left.

good trolling, but I suspect its not true. There’s a correlation between people who are richer/earn more, and those who vote towards the right. There’s also a correlation between those who are richer/earn more, and those who are more intelligent.

That’s not to say that being cleverer makes your more right leaning, I suspect it’s more that everyone is a little bit selfish, being intelligent makes you more likely to earn more than average, and therefore your selfishness\view of the world makes you more likely to align with a right-leaning party

It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if right wingers had more problems, but that is my left wing prejudice bigotry– I would love to know if there was any evidence of this?

I think you were close with the word prejudice but not quite acurate enough.

cynic-al – Member
We need a chart of how many have been killed by left vs right wingers.

And seriously, what rotor stern said.

Chairman Mao along killed directly/indirectly between 48 million to 78 million in 4 years. He communist. 😛

Roter Stern – Member
I always thought people who are right wing inclined are people with limited ability for empathy.

Ya right … Pol Pot and mates would bludgeon you to death for even trying to think. He communist too 😛

Intelligence and empathy tends to make most people appreciate that the world and its most prescient issues are a panoply of greys. Absence of either makes extremist views tenable and justifiable.

I guess it’s fair to surmise that those currently suffering with mental health issues might be temporarily or permanently lacking in empathy or not using their faculties to their fullest so it’s not a huge leap to imagine extreme right or left wing opinions might be more easily held.

Sounds like your friend is bored or looking for answers elsewhere in their life. However, being “anti-establishment” does in no way a nutter make. Quite the opposite in fact…

You are confusing mental health and personality.

Right wing people will have less empathy and be more selfish. That is not a mental health thing, it is how they are genetically made up.

Which way you would go politically when having a mental health issue is anybodies guess and would depend on what mental health issue you had.

Fairly ignorant question really…

left wing prejudice

Those three words seem to be seen together a lot, a natural fit ?

OP are you trying to move on from the “lower educational standards” mean you vote differently to “me” to now roll this up to more of a, if you disagree with me you must be mental. How very 1960’s

kerley

You are confusing mental health and personality.

No, he (sorry if I’m misgendering) isn’t confused about anything. It’s not a legitimate question, it’s rhetorical. The intention is to add “mental health issues” to the long list of insults used by the inhabitants of Singletrackworld’s socialist village use to vilify and dismiss anything they disagree with.

Racist, xenophobe, stupid, Trumper, Brexiter, mental etc etc. Just a nice little echo chamber.

You are confusing mental health and personality.

Right wing people will have less empathy and be more selfish. That is not a mental health thing, it is how they are genetically made up.

Yes but you’re confusing politics with prejudice and bigotry or at best, you’re reducing the right of politics to only being about these things.

There are a lot of people whose politics are right of centre who also extreme liberals. You can be economically right and culturally left.

Chairman Mao along killed directly/indirectly between 48 million to 78 million in 4 years. He communist.

You’re automatically assuming Communism = left. Gandhi was left of centre too:

https://www.politicalcompass.org/analysis2

There is a well documented disorder where sufferers believe that people with different political views must have a mental health diisorder. Oddly this disorder seems to be more prevalent at one end of the spectrum than the other – or that could be just that we have a biased sample here. Who knows?

I suppose a right wing prejudice might make you think that 😉

fascist might be a better description for the underlying philosophy of those two – as I pointed out earlier, lumping them in with lefties because they used communism as a means to achieve their ends is to completely misunderstand them. They had far more in common with extreme right wingers than with normal left-wing liberals. As I also pointed out earlier, one of the most notorious mass murderers who is commonly thought of as being right wing was the leader of a socialist party.

No, he (sorry if I’m misgendering) isn’t confused about anything. It’s not a legitimate question, it’s rhetorical. The intention is to add “mental health issues” to the long list of insults used by the inhabitants of Singletrackworld’s socialist village use to vilify and dismiss anything they disagree with.

Racist, xenophobe, stupid, Trumper, Brexiter, mental etc etc. Just a nice little echo chamber.

Sadly, I have to agree with this statement.

Slab….

http://www.livescience.com/18132-intelligence-social-conservatism-racism.html

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/www.thelondoneconomic.com/satire/study-reveals-mainly-stupid-people-will-vote-brexit/20/06/amp/?client=ms-android-h3g-gb

😈 😆

I think it’s fair to say that anyone involved in politics…how can I put this..is not quite right in the head.

This… politics as a profession is more about desiring power and influence than anything else.

In terms of more ‘normal’ people. Of the people I’ve known who were the most party political (members of a particular party, very dogmatic in their political views, very judgemental of people with different political views), there were elements of poor mental health also present. These are people I know very well – family or friends for some 15+ years.

My view is that it wasn’t their political views which made them unhealthy per se (the people I’m thinking about came from both left and right ends of the spectrum) – they had all had traumatic childhoods and found the world and all it’s shades of grey very difficult to deal with – and they found political dogma very comforting as it simplified the world for them and gave them a set of rules to follow and a tribe to belong to.
There were diagnoses of depression and stress in all of these people…

So my view is people with poor mental health may well find political dogma attractive as a way of coping with the randomness and challenges of the real world…

Liberals on the other hand, drift around in the middle somewhere without any real dogma or ideology as they’re largely at peace with themselves and the world, hence being happy for others to live their own lives as they see fit and are happy to form their own opinions rather than being dependent on someone else’s dogma.

It’d be interesting to see any formal research which enlightens this debate, especially as we’re currently polarising.

I think the rise of the far right across the West is a response from insecure people of the rise of liberalism – the lack of black and white scares them silly – they just can’t cope with the lack of rules that society is operating in – hence someone like Farage or Le Pen comes along with their right wing rhetoric and they swallow it whole – like a child with a comfort blanket.
There may be a link here between our ageing population and the move to the right – not that older people are more right wing but in a world which has changed so much so fast, it’s harder for older people to cope than younger people, therefore older people find the far right dogma more appealing than the young do. So hopefully in 20 years time liberalism will come back to dominate…

You might as well ask whether people who are right leaning suffer more from appendicitis, or meninigitis, or cancer.

Mental illness is an illness, like any other illness. The clue is in the name.

Politics is a choice.

There’s a political truism that says that most Left leaning power mad fanatical nutbugs go in for Totalitarianism, whereas their right wing corrupted facists counterparts are happy enough with authoritarianism.

reluctantlondoner – Member
I’m left wondering from all of the political threads of late if there is any correlation between politics of a particular persuasion and a greater incidence of mental health problems.

Yes, yes there is.

OP, I thought the real takeaway from mindset was that the growth mindset was teachable?