As ‘political depression’ enters public discourse, therapists are encouraging people to engage with their communities
When Rebecca McFaul woke up in her small farmhouse in Logan, Utah, on a cold January day, she felt the same way she’d been feeling for months: “A certain kind of terror and horror at it all.” Most of her family lives in Minnesota, and for weeks, she’d watched from afar as families were taken by agents, activists were shot and tear gas hung in the air.
A music professor at Utah State University, she’d spent the day with her students, but struggled to focus. Then she came home and read more bad news, this time, a piece in the newspaper about two Maga influencers railing against the dangers of compassion in response to the detainment of 5-year-old Liam Ramos in Minneapolis. “It was such a betrayal on every level,” McFaul said. “Of sisterhood, of motherhood, of decency.”
It had been a year that already seemed long with terrible things in the news. But for McFaul, this was the last straw. She was filled with a rage she hadn’t known was in her. She couldn’t shake the thought: “This is seismic. This is just all upside down.”
A typical therapist might say McFaul was depressed and give her some exercises to regulate her nervous system or some medication to take the edge off. But the queer scholar and writer Ann Cvetkovitch has a different name for McFaul’s dark mood. She is experiencing classic symptoms of “political depression” – the knowledge that the world is falling apart paired with the “sense that customary forms of political response … are no longer working either to change the world or to make us feel better”.
