Why Progressives Affirm Psychiatric Disorders
Deaths from “assisted suicide” and “harm reduction” are rising in places governed by Democrats and Liberals
Nobody cares about mental health more than progressives, Democrats, and Liberals, they say. The political Left has long urged universal health care, including mental health care. It’s the Left that’s most strongly advocated for the humane treatment of the mentally ill since the 19th Century. In the 1960s, progressives advocated for residential care and a move away from the giant and often cruel asylums. During the same period, it was liberals and progressives who pioneered the human potential and self-help movements. And it’s been Democrats in the US, Liberals in Canada, and Left-wing parties in Europe that have advocated for greater compassion, humanity, and nuance in the treatment of people with both serious mental illnesses like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and more curable psychiatric disorders such as ADHD, OCD, and depression.
And yet nobody is inflicting more cruelty, barbarism, and inhumanity upon people with mental illness and psychiatric disorders than liberals, progressives, and the political Left. Across the Western world, progressive politicians, mental health care advocates, and leading liberal experts are affirming and worsening, rather than properly treating, suicidality, anxiety, depression, addiction, and gender dysphoria. The result of their policies is a shocking 30% increase in total deaths (13,241) from “assisted suicide” in Canada, 463 of which were of individuals who were not terminally ill; record and rising drug overdose deaths in San Francisco enabled by “harm reduction” policies that include giving addicts drugs, cash, and paraphernalia, including crack pipes, as President Joe Biden’s 2022 budget proposed doing; and rising regret among previously gender dysphoric people, known as “detransitioners,” who underwent irreversible surgeries and drug treatments.
It’s not the case that progressives always worsen psychiatric disorders or are the sole cause of them. Nor are libertarians and conservatives reliable advocates of proven solutions to psychiatric disorders. In my 2021 book, San Fransicko, I point to the success of the Netherlands in dealing with addiction and other psychiatric disorders, and most Americans would consider the Netherlands, with its acceptance of same-sex relationships, its decriminalization of marijuana, and its universal health care system, to be liberal or progressive. And there are progressive North American cities, such as Boston, that do not let people suffering from schizophrenia rot in the streets, requiring the amputation of their lower legs, as San Francisco does.
However, the progressive mistreatment of well-established psychiatric disorders is widespread across the Western world and more common than conservative and libertarian mistreatment of the same disorders. The local Amsterdam government enabled heroin addiction in the 1980s until voters elected stricter and more conservative city leaders, who shut down the open-air drug scenes, set limits on “harm reduction,” and mandated rehab. And, in the Netherlands today, there are far stricter regulations over assisted suicide, harm reduction, and the use of drugs and surgery to modify the bodies of people with gender dysphoria than in the US and Canada.
And across the Western world, it’s progressive and Left-wing political parties, NGOs, and grassroots movements, not right-wing ones, that are promoting the histrionic and anxiety-affirming idea that Western liberal democratic civilizations are intractably racist, sexist, homophobic, and doomed to ecological apocalypse. Depression is linked to three depressing ideas: we are bad, the world is a bad place, and the future is dark. That narrative creates and affirms depression while talking back to it forms the core of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), the only proven therapeutic antidote to depression. There is a growing body of research showing that progressive youth and adults suffer higher rates of psychiatric disorders and that one of the leading causes is what Jonathan Haidt and Gregory Lukianoff call “reverse CBT.”
