In perhaps the most shocking news you’ll hear all day, it turns out that believing everyone is racist, being terrified of guns, promoting rampant infanticide and constantly griping about how the government isn’t giving away enough free stuff can make a person really, really depressed.
Okay, so no that shocking. But, as it turns out, it’s true.
According to a study out from Columbia University and published in the journal Social Science & Medicine – Mental Health found that liberal teen girls report being depressed at far higher rates than conservative ones, so much so that researchers concluded “internalizing” left-wing beliefs was clearly bad for a young person’s mental health.
The study, titled "The politics of depression: Diverging trends in internalizing symptoms among US adolescents by political beliefs," analyzed 12th made girls from 2005 all the way up to 2018, asking them whether they self-identified with “conservatism,” defined in the study as "support of individual liberty, right-wing social and religious values, and unregulated free markets,” or “liberalism,” defined as "support of equal opportunity, free but semi-regulated markets, civil liberties, and social justice.”
And the results were pretty clear. The findings revealed that “conservatives reported lower average depressive affect, self-derogation, and loneliness scores and higher self-esteem scores than all other groups.”
Of the 44,534 girls surveyed over those 13 years, only 6,645 identified as “conservative,” with 10,308 saying they were “liberal” and another 10,234 calling themselves “moderate.” However, conservative girls reported the lowest average “depressive affect score” of any group polled, coming in lower than liberal girls and both liberal and conservative boys. In fact, while the percentage of conservative boys and girls reporting depression steadily rose between 2014 and 2018, at no point did either category come close to the depression levels reported by liberal students of either gender.
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Researchers also found liberalism seemed to have a particular effect on girls. While both male and female left-leaning students reported about the same rates of poor mental health between 2005 and 2011, the downward spiral of depression for liberal teen girls seemed to escalate from that point on.
Of course, analysts who reviewed the data couldn’t accept the hypothesis that being a pessimistic narcissist with a perpetual victimhood complex might be enough to bum anyone out. Instead, researchers deduced that young liberal women must be more depressed than anyone else - especially their conservative counterparts - because they’re simply more “woke” than everyone else, therefore tuned into real-world problems while all their right-leaning classmates are busy burying their heads in the sand.
“[C]onservative ideology may work as a psychological buffer by harmonizing an idealized worldview with the bleak external realities experienced by many,” the study noted, adding that liberals are more preoccupied with the "war, climate change, school shootings, structural racism, police violence against Black people, pervasive sexism and sexual assault, and rampant socioeconomic inequality [that] became unavoidable features of political discourse.”
Or, maybe a life centered on personal responsibility, independence, fiscal aptitude, familial and relational stability, and faith in God - all general hallmarks of conservatism - might just leave you an overall happier person than being a continually disgruntled victim strutting around with a chip on your shoulder.