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?

One possibility is that our personalities drive our politics. That is, people who are more positive in their outlook, or less vexed by class-based and racial inequalities, might be more likely to call themselves conservatives. Or, in a more nuanced way, conservatives might be more likely to participate in (or even find that their conservatism is partly formed by) activities that happen to also confer happiness, such as going to church, getting married, having children, and earning lots of money.

Yet another possibility is that sometimes our politics shape our mental health. An analysis of data from the Baylor Religious Survey found that “identity politics”—roughly speaking: a moral imperative to fight oppression against a given social out-group—was strongly correlated with “lower well-being” while a desire for higher government spending wasn’t. Perhaps for liberal women whose politics revolve around identifying injustice, the smartphone era has meant living inside a near-constant reminder of the world’s unfairness, and the result is a heightened vulnerability to anxiety and depression. By contrast, conservatives, especially from religious and educated families, may find psychological protection in a worldview that smooths over the rough edges of social conflict.

All of these interpretations assume that the strong relationship between political ideology and mental health is real. But in the last week, I’ve come across two new studies that deeply challenge the idea that progressives are simply the sad ones¹.

In the April 2025 paper “Do conservatives really have better mental well-being than liberals?” Brian F. Schaffner, a political scientist at Tufts University, and his co-authors did an experiment where they randomly assigned people to evaluate their “mental health” or their “mood.” The goal was to get around any possible conservative stigma toward mental health. Lo and behold, the typical conservative said they were actually in a worse mood than the typical liberal despite having a much higher mental health score. As the authors wrote in the conclusion:

When respondents were asked to assess their mood, the gap between liberals and conservatives disappeared. Conservatives were actually somewhat less likely than liberals to provide a highly positive rating of their overall mood.

When I shared this paper on Twitter last week, the most common interpretation from liberals was that many self-deluding conservatives probably don’t want to admit that they suffer from a mental health disorder even if the qualia of their daily experience meet any standard definition of depression. That’s possible.

But I must insist that mood and mental health are only sorta-kinda synonymous. A couple of nights ago, my daughter screamed her way through bath time, and then screamed her way through bedtime, and only after I put her to sleep did I realize that we’d run out of a Trader Joe’s ice cream snack that I was really looking forward to after a long day. If Schaffner’s postdoc had called me the moment I closed the freezer in despair to ask if I was in a good mood, I would have punctuated the answer “no” with several unprintable adjectives. If he had asked me if I was suffering from Major Depressive Disorder, I also would have said no.²

The more interesting possibility here—which would require more data to prove—is that today’s Democrats and Republicans have similar levels of neuroticism, or negative emotions, but opposite modes of expressing bad feelings³. The Republican Party under Donald Trump is remarkably fixated on vast conspiracy. It is deeply distrustful of legacy institutions, such as media and higher education, and deeply trusting of outsiders to fix or destroy these systems. But while conservative neuroticism cashes out in an outward-facing paranoia, liberal neuroticism is internalized as a hopelessness that, for diagnostic purposes, is clinically labeled “anxiety” or “depression.” Conservatives externalize: They are “happy,” but also paranoid and angry. Liberals internalize: More trusting, but more anxious and depressive. It’s not that one side is so much more blissed out than the other, but rather that each party has evolved its own grammar of despair, with conservatives posting in paranoia, while liberals monologue to their therapists.

In fact, the relationship between depression and liberalism might be even more complicated than I’ve presented. A new paper by Harvard University’s Matthew A. Baum et al., entitled “Depression, Populism, and Presidential Approval” traced the relationship between depression and support for Donald Trump in 2020 and 2024. If you believe that liberals are more depressed than conservatives, it would follow that the most depressed Democrats would have the lowest approval of Donald Trump. Simple as that.

But these authors found the exact opposite. Higher depression scores were associated with increased support for Trump in 2024.

The relationship between higher depression scores and higher support for Trump was almost entirely a function of high-depression Democrats shifting strongly toward Trump. Among the least depressed Democrats, Joe Biden had a +43 net approval in 2024. Among the most depressed Democrats, his approval plummeted to just +9.

What is going on here? The findings of this paper surprised me so much that I reached out to Baum to make sure that I understood its conclusions. In our email exchange, Baum stressed that their finding was correlational and not causal, but his hypothesis is fascinating. Voters with depressive symptoms might be “more likely to approve of a populist politician” in part because they associate their negative feelings with political conditions and lose trust in incumbent institutions. In this interpretation, populism is a political prescription for depression, with Trump serving as a big orange ketamine gummy.

If there’s an empirical connection between rising depressive symptoms and surging support for political populism, that’s an omen for the future of American politics. Between 2020 and 2023, nearly half of Americans reported at least mild levels of depression. For Americans under 25, nearly half consistently said they experienced “moderate-to-severe depressive symptoms,” according to a 2023 study by Perlis et al. Depression rates are surging among young people, not only in the U.S., but throughout the English-speaking world. I’ve reported on the decline of mental health throughout the West and the rise of political populism, but it never occurred to me that these were dominos clicking into each other.

If I had to summarize these papers in a paragraph, I’d put it like this: The finding that progressives report more anxiety and depression than conservatives is well established. But it risks oversimplifying the story if we treat liberals as uniquely “mentally unhealthy” and conservatives as inherently “well adjusted.” A more useful interpretation is that both camps might carry a similar burden of neuroticism, expressed through different political dialects—liberals inwardly, as anxiety and self-criticism; conservatives outwardly, as anger and paranoia. And the picture becomes even more complex when evidence shows that depressive symptoms can heighten support for populist conservatives, even among Democrats. That suggests despair is not a partisan quirk but a general political force—one that is shaping American politics today and is likely to shape it even more in an era of lingering malaise.

1. I discovered both papers thanks to the John Sides, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University. Thanks John!

2. I am only half-joking when I point out that conservatives being more likely to have infants at home would at least partly explain the mood/mental health divide.

3. In fact, personality psychologists (e.g., Hirsh et al 2010) have found that liberals and conservatives do not differ much in baseline neuroticism.