Apparently Trump Anxiety Disorder in the age of Trump is real and it’s leading many to seek professional help:
“Is he gonna blow us all up?”
So inquired one of Elisabeth LaMotte’s patients recently, fretting out loud about the volatility of U.S. President Donald Trump’s actions during a therapy session at her Washington practice.
It was a rhetorical question — one that predated Trump’s threats of a showdown with Iran this week. But if the question wasn’t meant in earnest, the politically induced anxiety LaMotte is hearing about from her clients certainly is, says the founder of the D.C. Counselling and Psychotherapy Center.
She refers to it as a “collective anxiety” among patients who feel on edge about how potentially dire the president’s decisions could be.
“There is a fear of the world ending,” she said. “It’s very disorienting and constantly unsettling.”
What’s been called “Trump Anxiety Disorder” has been on the rise in the months following the election, according to mental-health professionals from across the country who report unusually high levels of politics-related stress in their practices.
In a 2017 essay for a book co-edited by psychiatrists from Harvard Medical School and the Yale School of Medicine, clinical psychologist Jennifer Panning of Evanston, Ill., called the condition “Trump Anxiety Disorder,” distinguishing it from a generalized anxiety disorder because “symptoms were specific to the election of Trump and the resultant unpredictable sociopolitical climate.”
Though not an official diagnosis, the symptoms include feeling a loss of control and helplessness, and fretting about what’s happening in the country and spending excessive time on social media, she said.
Panning said intense consumption of media coverage of this presidency is making some people’s Trump-related anxiety worse.
“They say they’re wondering what’s next,” she said.
Trump’s appointment of one conservative justice to the Supreme Court and the recent nomination of another has left one of her married lesbian clients “significantly concerned about the legitimacy of their marriage in the future,” she said.
“There is a fear of the world ending”.
All because of Trump? He might be good, but he’s not that good.
Seriously though, are we in the age of snowflakes or what? Look I totally get being upset about the political climate, as I was for the entire two terms of Obama. But being upset to the point of needing professional help for it?
I guess the hysteria on the left is worse than we thought.