Why Are Liberals More Depressed?

Mental health, ideology, and the psycho-politics of the future

Photo by arash payam on Unsplash

Progressives are more anxious and depressed than conservatives. This is not my personal opinion, nor is it a momentary snapshot of the left’s particularly awful mood in the autumn of 2025. It is a sturdy finding from dozens of papers spanning decades of research across psychology, sociology, and political science.

And it might be wrong. (We’ll get to that in a second.)

In one representative analysis, the 2022 paper “The Politics of Depression,” published by the journal Social Science & Medicine–Mental Health, the epidemiologist Catherine Gimbrone and several coauthors showed that young progressives in high school are significantly more depressed than conservatives. As the chart below indicates, liberal girls have for many years self-reported a higher depressive affect score than conservative girls, and the gap has grown moderately over time.

Using data from the Monitoring the Future survey of more than 85,000 students between 2005 and 2018, Gimbrone and her co-authors showed that large gaps have opened up between liberal girls and other groups on negative self-esteem and self-derogation (or, feelings of intense self-criticism). Conservative boys reported the smallest changes, while “female liberal adolescents without a parent with a college degree reported the worst internalizing symptom scores,” they concluded.

These studies have always troubled me. I am a liberal. I also care deeply about despair and contentment and how to move us from the former to the latter. In the big picture, nothing matters more. If everything I want most from policy and technology came to fruition—more housing in high-demand areas; superabundant clean electric energy; responsive and efficient governance at every level; less chronic disease and pain; new cancer drugs; stronger social relationships—and also, in this dreamland, the best survey evidence indicated that Americans were more depressed than ever, I would consider the outcome to be more tragedy than utopia.

So, I’ve always wanted to understand the nature of this relationship: Why are progressives so depressed? Or, just as significantly: Why are conservatives so happy?