Psychologists warn ‘Trump Anxiety Disorder’ is soaring

August 3, 2018 in News by RBN Staff

 

Source: One News Now

 

Mental health therapists have reported an acute rise in Americans suffering from “Trump Anxiety Disorder” – primarily diagnosed in those who fear that President Donald Trump is leading the world into oblivion through his politically incorrect policies and unapologetic temperament.

More and more patients are showing up for psychiatric help because they cannot deal with life under a Trump administration.

“U.S. President Donald Trump’s name comes up an awful lot when Americans discuss their politics-related anxiety with their therapists,” Canada’s CBC News reported. “In a divided U.S., therapists treating anxiety are hearing the same name over and over: Donald Trump … ‘Trump Anxiety Disorder’ may not be an official diagnosis [yet], but therapists know the symptoms.”

Just can’t handle the stress

Once the reality of a Trump presidency for four years settled in, patients started settling into to their local therapists’ couches to unload their fears about eight years of a liberal Obama presidency coming to an end – and the commencement of four to eight years of politically incorrect practices coming into play.

“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,” CBC’s Matt Kwong informed. “And it’s maybe not surprising – given the relentlessly negative headlines and politically divisive climate.”

D.C. Counseling and Psychotherapy Center Founder Elisabeth LaMotte shared a paranoiac question one of her patients recently asked her when fretting out loud over Trump’s bold and unyielding stand against threatening forces.

“Is he gonna blow us all up?” the patient asked LaMotte during a therapy session, according to CBC.

The rhetorical question was posed before Trump threatened a showdown with Iran earlier this week, so it could have been referring to a potential nuclear conflict with North Korean, but the mental health therapist insisted that regardless of whether or not her clients truly think Trump will lead to their destruction, their politically induced anxiety is a reality.

“She refers to it as a ‘collective anxiety’ among patients who feel on edge about how potentially dire the president’s decisions could be,” Kwong pointed out.

LaMotte described the mental trauma that her leftist clients in the nation’s capital are fussing over.

“There is a fear of the world ending,” she shared with CDC. “It’s very disorienting and constantly unsettling.”

The conservative news media is calling out Democrats who stress over Trump as overreacting and being too mentally fragile.

“Everything the Trump administration does is a harbinger of the apocalypse – he’s a threat to democracy, he’s a cancer on our institutions, [but] he’s neither,” Townhall’s Matt Vespa argued. “You guys just lost, and you can’t deal with it.”

He insisted that complaining left-leaning Trump detractors need to grow up and show some mental toughness and dignity.

“You’re the petulant little children we all think you are,” Vespa added. “In the mental health community, there’s been a spike in patients suffering from – get this – ‘Trump Anxiety Disorder.’ In other words, these are the weakest, most pathetic people on the planet.”

It is believed by some that the negative headlines generated by the mainstream media about Trump is to blame for frenzied minds in America.

“This week, it was a menacing all-caps Trump tweet warning Iran about potentially historic “CONSEQUENCES,” Kwong noted. “Previously, it was his Supreme Court picks and fears that the legal right to abortion could be overturned, or his immigration policies separating families at the border, or his apparent submission to Russian President Vladimir Putin before a global audience.”

Trump stressing out supporters and dissentients alike?

LaMotte claims that Trump is responsible for bringing both his backers and opponents alike mental anguish.

“From Trump supporters, LaMotte hears about the pain of ‘feeling socially or familially isolated’ for supporting the president’s agenda, ‘even if they don’t support his tactics,’” Kwong recounted. “From Trump’s detractors, LaMotte has been struck by how much their anxieties resemble those of patients raised by a parent with a personality disorder – someone who would display traits like ‘grandiosity, excessive attention-seeking and severe lack of empathy.’”

LaMotte then went as far as to compare Trump with a mentally abusive parent.

“Whether it’s conscious or not, I think we look to the president of the United States as a psychological parent,” the D.C. therapist shared with CDC.

Where’s this coming from?

The term used to identify the questionable so-called “disorder” was coined just last year – unsurprisingly in a book edited by medical professionals from ultra-left Ivy League schools.

“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,’” Kwong explained. “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.”

But the president and fellow conservatives have shot back and coined a term of their own to describe what detractors are feeling.

“Trump and his supporters, for their part, have their own term for a malady they see as afflicting only reactionary, anti-Trump progressives: ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome,’” Kwong added.

Panning warned those who cannot stomach the news to refrain from dwelling upon the headlines, claiming that ingesting a large amount of negative coverage exacerbates many individuals’ Trump-related anxiety.

“They say they’re wondering what’s next,” she told CDC.

The president’s decision to fill a vacancy in the nation’s highest court with a morally minded justice was blamed for anxiety within the LGBT community.

“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,” Kwong noted.

Another Trump detractor, Connie Sherman, who manages a dental practice in San Diego, California, complained that she has been fitfully tossing and turning in bed since Trump was elected, noting that she frequently checks her phone throughout the wee hours of the night to keep tabs on the latest headlines about the presidents’ doings.

“When [special counsel] Robert Mueller’s indictments news dropped, I wound up staying up in the middle of the night when I should have been sleeping, just thinking about it, just worried for our country,” Mueller shared with CBC.

Psychologists are serious about this

Mental health professionals at the American Psychological Association (APA) revealed in its Stress in America: Coping with Change report that it has the numbers to prove that Trump is driving the nation into a mental crisis.

“Two-thirds of Americans say they are stressed about the future of our nation – including a majority of both Democrats and Republicans,” an APA press release issued last year revealed. “More than half of Americans (57 percent) say the current political climate is a very or somewhat significant source of stress, and nearly half (49 percent) say the same about the outcome of the election, according to an APA poll conducted in January.”

Not surprisingly, Democrats had a much harder time dealing with reality.

“While Democrats were more likely than Republicans (72 percent vs. 26 percent) to report the outcome of the 2016 presidential election as a significant source of stress, a majority of Republicans (59 percent) said the future of the nation was a significant source of stress for them, compared with 76 percent of Democrats,” APA pointed out.

APA Executive Director for Professional Practice Katherine C. Nordal, Ph.D., says the so-called epidemic in America over Trump and his politics is virtually unavoidable.

“The stress we’re seeing around political issues is deeply concerning, because it’s hard for Americans to get away from it,” Nordal stated in the press release. “We’re surrounded by conversations, news and social media that constantly remind us of the issues that are stressing us the most.”

She stressed that APA has witnessed ongoing stress centered around politics, with the poll indicating that more and more Americans are saying their stress levels are increasing over terrorist acts, threats to their own personal safety and police violence against minorities.