The Politicalization of "Mental Health"

Should conservatives use the phrase "mental health"?

Photo by Marcel Strauß on Unsplash

Derek Thompson

posted an interesting new study on Twitter a few days ago that suggests that the much promoted difference in mental health between conservatives and liberals may be entirely attributed to the phrase “mental health.” This is from the study’s abstract:

While conservatives report much higher mental health ratings, asking instead about overall mood eliminated the gap between liberals and conservatives. One explanation is that rather than a genuine mental health divide, conservatives may inflate their mental health ratings when asked, due to stigma surrounding the term.

As a conservative who has written extensively about mental health and is unafraid of the term, I find this fascinating and yet unsurprising. It confirms some priors I have about the way “mental health” is politically coded in the wider culture as a “progressive” concern rather than a human concern. Whereas you would never see something like oncology coded conservative or progressive (although we have seen virology coded progressive!). Why has “mental health” been coded as “progressive” and is there a way for conservatives to use this term that is meaningful and helpful? Is the “stigma surrounding the term” justified, or should we be fighting to reclaim language of mental health?

As I hope to argue, “mental health” is precisely the language we should be using to describe the struggle all of us face to deal with the difficulties of life emotionally and cognitively. And we can adopt this language without adopting progressive assumptions about values, agency, or technique.