Crazy is, admittedly, a bit of a pejorative term. But as a new study published by Political Behavior shows, not only have the negative connotations attached to mental health conditions fallen as the prevalence of mental illness risen, but an increasingly large percentage of Americans use mental health as a source of political identity, particularly younger Americans.
Previous studies have already shown that people who report suffering from mental illness at least at some point in their lives are more likely to support higher government spending on not just healthcare, but also other Democratic Party priorities such as education and welfare. Other research has shown that Democrats are far more likely to report having suffered from mental illness than Republicans.
And using the 2022 Cooperative Election Study, Utah State University Assistant Professor of Political Science Lauren Van De Hey confirms that just 16% of those that consider themselves “very conservative” or “conservative” report having suffered a mental illness at least once in their life, compared to 31% of those who consider themselves “liberal” and 39% of those who consider themselves “very liberal.”
Van De Hey further used Cooperative Election Study data to create Mental Health Identity and Alienation scores from responses to seven follow-up questions asked only to those who first said they had suffered from a mental illness in their lifetime. The questions measured whether respondents considered mental illness important to their own identity, how strongly they identified with other people with mental illness, whether they believed people with mental illness should work together to change unfair laws, and whether they thought people with mental illness in America had a lot in common with one another. By combining these answers, Van De Hey created a score meant to capture not just private experience with mental illness, but whether respondents understood that experience as a shared group identity with political meaning.
