Is Being A Democrat Bad For Your Mental Health?

Of course, it is in poor taste to ask this question just days after a deranged, violent man threatened to blow up New Hampshire campaign workers to get Hillary Clinton's attention. Yes, it would be classier to pass over in silence the accident that just as news of the hostage crisis was hitting the front page, a new Gallup Poll suggesting Republicans enjoy better mental health was not.

But some coincidences are too juicy to ignore, especially after years of watching media play up stories of studies diagnosing conservatism as a mental disorder -- e.g., Aug. 12, 2003, The Guardian: "A study funded by the U.S. government has concluded that conservatism can be explained psychologically as a set of neuroses rooted in 'fear and aggression, dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity'"; or this year's Sept. 12 L.A. Times report, "Left Brain, Right Brain," on a small study by N.Y.U. professor David Amodio and colleagues whose results, the paper reports, "suggest that liberals might be better judges of the facts than conservatives."

So forgive me for paying attention, especially since the findings themselves are so interesting and so robust: Fifty-eight percent of Republicans say their mental health is "excellent," compared to just 38 percent of Democrats, according to Gallup's analysis of data from the last four November Gallup Health and Healthcare polls. Democrats were also nearly twice as likely as Republicans to rate their own mental health as only "fair" or "poor."

Such self-reports of mental health are routinely used by sociologists in large nationally representative databases, and have been found to correlate with more extensive diagnostic criteria.

When I read the headline, I immediately jumped to the same conclusion that you probably did: There are obvious reasons. I know that religious people and married people both enjoy better mental health than those who are not married and not religious, and that on average, Republicans are more likely than Democrats to be both in church on Sunday and at home with their spouse on Saturday night.

A Democrat on the other hand might leap to the conclusion the partisan mental health gap is an artifact of socioeconnomic status: Of course the "haves" of society enjoy better mental health than the "have-nots" and are also more likely to be Republican.

Well, guess what? We are both wrong. Gallup chopped and diced up the data every which way, controlling for income, education, religiosity, age, gender and even marital status, and still found that for Republicans everything's coming up rosy, while Democrats see through the glass, but more darkly.

For example, 45 percent of Republicans in households earning less than $50,000 a year say their mental health is excellent, compared to just 31 percent of Democrats. On the affluent end, 67 percent of Republicans making more than $50,000 say they enjoy excellent mental health compared to less than half (48 percent) of Democrats. The majority of Republicans (51 percent) with a high school diploma or less report excellent mental health compared to just 31 percent of Democrats. Even 50 percent of Republicans who "never" attend church still say they are in great mental health, compared to just 37 percent of nonreligious Democrats.

In an analysis that controlled for all these variables simultaneously, Gallup still found "an independent and highly significant impact of being a Republican on mental health."

My take? A belief that individuals can successfully provide for themselves in an existing social order that is fundamentally decent and moral may not, in fact, be true. But the surgeon general be advised: believing otherwise is apparently hazardous to your mental health.