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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   32631 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 2, 2025

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"Leftism is both a cause and effect of acute mental illness"

Query: are Leftists or Rightists more likely to report experiencing Demonic Possession? There are about 1,000 exorcisms a year in the United States, though the numbers aren't exactly reported in surveys, and I'd imagine a lot of Pentecostal exorcists don't think the Catholic exorcists are doing shit-all and vice versa. What is reporting Demonic Possession going to correlate with? Well mostly, it's going to correlate with belief in Demonic Possession, essentially no one who doesn't believe in Demons will report it, and essentially no one who isn't religious believes in Demons; so we can guess that more right wingers report demonic possession.

Similarly, self-reports of mental illness, which is what the study measured, correlate mainly that one believes in mental illness and has had contact with the mental health industrial complex. This correlates very strongly with left wing politics. I doubt the effect exists if one balanced for that first.

I should note my own prior here; you're much better off with a priest than a shrink.

I should note my own prior here; you're much better off with a priest than a shrink.

I would not be shocked to see a study with a dataset supporting that exorcism is a better mental health intervention than therapy.

The median outcome of beginning the exorcism process is ‘you’re imagining it, go see a mental health specialist. We can provide a list of catholic psychologists and psychiatrists sorted by gender if you’d like’.

It should be noted that there are way more cases of mental illness than exorcisms. And at least Catholic exorcists won’t even see you unless a shrink checks you out to make sure you’re not just crazy(indeed, Scott has done this). Not exactly an apples to apples comparison.

Sure, and way more people in today's America genuinely, deeply believe in mental illness than believe in demonic possession. We'll see more explanations from the dominant religion of Scientism than we will from other religions. Even pious Catholics acknowledge the dominion of Science and Psychology, even most self-identified Catholics don't really believe in demonic possession as something that might happen to them today.

Though, you're right in that even within their respective paradigms, mental illness is much more common than demonic possession, and a "mental illness" like mild ADHD isn't much compared to possession. So maybe a better analogy would be if we had a survey asking people if they "are a sinner?" Far more right wingers would say they are sinners than left wingers, this would not reflect any underlying reality about sin.

I just don't really accept that "mental illness" is much of an explanation for anything, divorced from generalized statistics about outcomes, which are much more mixed and inconclusive and mostly gets into a series of No-True-Scotsman and Motte-and-Bailey games around what is actually meant by Red Tribe and Blue Tribe. There's something "the enemy is both strong and weak" about saying leftism is the cause and effect of mental illness, while also saying the left controls all the levels of power and all the commanding heights of industry and academia and culture.

the dominant religion of Scientism

There are a couple of phrases which make me discount pretty much anything people are using them to say. This is one of them.

This is just a sneer, isn't it?

Can you put some meat on it?

"Scientism" is itself a sneer, and insofar as it means anything, is usually a false accusation claiming that people worship science or use science when they should be using feelings instead. Of course since its actual meaning is vague, anyone who uses it can deny meaning what they are using it to to mean and there's no way to prove them wrong.

Do you doubt the dogmatic power of positivism or are you an adherent for whom "it's just the truth"?

Do we do false dichotomies here, or do we do false dichotomies here?

Any other answer is acceptable, I was genuinely asking. It just seems mysterious to be allergic to the concept of scientism in a world where this building exists.

But their point wasn't that exorcism numbers balance out mental illness numbers. Their point was that the formal part of a formal mental illness diagnosis is already strongly tribally coded, in the same way that a formal possession diagnosis is tribally coded. That is, therapy is integrated into Blue life in a way that it is not for Red life; it may be that Reds suffer mental illness at equivalent rates, but are simply vastly less likely to attempt to get treatment for it. Given the extremely questionable efficacy of therapy as a treatment, it's not obvious why what we see is not what we should expect to see, given an equivalent prevalence of mental illness: Crazy reds ignore it and cope as best they can, Crazy blues get "treatment" that largely does nothing, and then cope as best they can with roughly similar outcomes to the Reds.

This is not the way I would personally bet, as I think Blue Tribe has some legitimately fucked-up memes endemic in its environment that are in fact bad for the brain, but I would certainly not claim to be able to prove this at a population level. The replication crisis looms too large over the datasets, in my opinion.

Sûre, but every dataset available gives the same answer- blues have worse mental health.

Except men commit suicide more often and are more likely to be conservative. All that counting the number of people who say they have or are in treatment for mental health issues, can tell you is the number of known people, people who seek treatment or talk about it.

Men more often keep it in until they snap. Working class men specifically (who went about 63% for Trump) make up the majority of fatal drug overdoses, alcohol related deaths and suicides it appears. Self-medicating, coping and keeping it inside until you can't is the male strategy basically.

Blues have worse visible mental health is perhaps all we have the data to say. But I think there are enough signs that say that a lot of Red men particularly suffer what Blues would call mental health issues, they just don't talk about it and suffer through it in silence, until they drink/drug themselves to death slowly or kill themselves directly.

The truth may well be that Blue women particularly talk about it too much, and Red men particularly, don't talk about it enough. Which is going to confound any easy way to compare rates of mental health issues.

But how much this is confounded by the fact that the economic outlook for working class men in the Rust Belt is currently really bad? In 1975 you would have seen vastly higher amounts of fatal drug overdose rates in America’s ruined cities than out in the countryside. Now the situation is reversed.

Sure, that could be a cause. But the claim was that Blue mental health is worse than Red mental health because you hear about it more. That they might have different causes that vary over time isn't relevant to whether that is true or not. If Red mental health problems currently seem to manifest in different ways and thus are not as visible and thus not being counted as mental health issues at the rates at which they occur, that would be separate from what is causing them.

Why there are mental health issues is irrelevant as to whether we are measuring them accurately and if they appear at the same rates in the same ways in these different populations at any point in time. Conditions of course vary over time in both populations. If we were in 1975 then we'd also want to be seeing if those urban drug overdoses were hiding mental health issues, if we were doing the same comparison back then.

Do we have a dataset that doesn't consist of a survey question asking some variation on "Do you have bad mental health?"

Rates of completed suicide would work, at least in the senses I'd care about. Link a voter file with death certificates.

Unfortunately, no one has done this yet, afaict. There are state-aggregate studies showing that people in conservative states have higher suicide rates than those in liberal states, but ecological fallacy. I'm also not sure how to correct for demographics--or, rather, whether it makes sense to, since many of the same factors that correlate with suicide also correlate with Republican party affiliation.

I would think that's just measuring effectiveness of method. Firearms lead to more bodies, pills lead to more look at me attempts.

...you just split suicides/suicides attempts into gendered groups, not political. Men tend to be more successful, women tend to attempt it more.

What I had one person point out that's always stuck with me, however, is that an 'attempted suicide' moment for a man is going to be different for a woman. 'Attempted suicide' in that case is going to involve a man taking out a loaded gun, staring at it for an hour, and then quietly putting it away.

The crux of the argument being, 'attempts' in this situation are going to be manifest differently and trying to measure them scientifically is going to be messy and lossy as the result.

I doubt the effect exists if one balanced for that first.

Maybe! There are certainly confounders galore. There have been a variety of attempts to do as you've suggested, or make other, similar adjustments. The most recent one I'm aware of is here. From the abstract:

First, we examine whether the conservative-liberal divide in self-assessments of mental health remains once we control for a wide variety of demographics, socioeconomic factors, and recent life experiences. We find that accounting for these alternative explanations reduces the gap by about 40%, but that ideology remains a strong predictor of mental health self-reports. Second, we conducted an experiment where we randomly assigned whether people were asked to evaluate their mental health or their overall mood. 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. Another possibility is that ideological differences persist for some aspects of mental well-being, but not others.

I just can't help but notice that studies along these lines keep showing up, and keep generating the same kind of response. The 2023 study showing greater depressive affect in leftist teenagers, for example, generated dozens of think-pieces explaining that this was probably just a result of differences in self-reporting, or level of political engagement, or "hey maybe these kids should be depressed, if they're even remotely aware of how terrible things are." But as one of the more thorough essays (archive link to an American Affairs article) I've found on the matter suggests:

The well-being gap between liberals and conservatives is one of the most robust patterns in social science research. It is not a product of things that happened over the last decade or so; it goes back as far as the available data reach. The differences manifest across age, gender, race, religion, and other dimensions. They are not merely present in the United States, but in most other studied countries as well. Consequently, satisfying explanations of the gaps in reported well-being between liberals and conservatives would have to generalize beyond the present moment, beyond isolated cultural or geographic contexts, and beyond specific demographic group

...

[But the] implications and applications of these realities remain wide open to interpretation.

While conservatives report much higher mental health ratings, asking instead about overall mood eliminated the gap between liberals and conservatives.

Isn't this just a replication of hedonic adaptation? No matter how good you have it, most people feel "average" most of the time.

Mental health isn't really related to how someone's mood. Mental health is a measurement for how well a person can respond appropriately to life's challenges and has a good working model of the world. Even something like a "mood disorder" is one where there is a disconnect between actual life circumstances and the person's state of mind or feeling. If someone was feeling miserable because of actual life circumstances - say they're locked in a basement and getting tortured, no one would consider that a mood disorder. And a mood disorder also covers feelings of elation caused by BPD, feelings of anger, etc.

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