David’s view
“Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules,” was Saul Alinsky’s fourth rule for radicals, and the most fun to deploy. It was what Republican senators were doing last week when they began posting letters of support for Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., whose mental health was being probed by reporters after a damaging New York magazine profile.
“The radical left is smearing him with dishonest, vicious attacks because he’s pro-Israel,” wrote Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark. Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., praised the “incredible example” Fetterman set by talking about his depression. In The Wall Street Journal, Jamie Kirchick wrote that “attributing Mr. Fetterman’s political maturation to mental illness is shameful,” and that he was “doing for mental health what former First Lady Betty Ford did for addiction.” Adding to the troll: It’s Mental Health Awareness Month.
There’s opportunism among the Fetterman critics; the people who want him to resign know that a Democratic governor would pick his replacement. They were arguing that his post-stroke mental health struggles disqualified him from office, and that was at odds with the cultural acceptance of therapy, depression, and neurodivergence, much of that driven by liberals.
And this wasn’t happening in isolation. Earlier this month, former staff for Democratic ex-Rep. Yadira Caraveo told the Colorado Sun that her behavior was so “frightening and traumatizing” that they worried she might kill herself — and that she should not run for Congress again. Caraveo had talked openly about her depression during her 2024 campaign, to “de-stigmatize” it. Her team now believed that her condition made her unfit for Congress.
On the right, the idea that “acceptance” of mental health struggles had gone too far had deeper grounding. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s HHS is investigating the use of anti-depressants, starting from his premise — shared by many conservatives — that people are being medicalized for conditions they should be able to beat with healthier lifestyles. The premise of the Defense Department’s purge of transgender servicemembers is that the military had been too tolerant of “gender dysphoria” and its purported “mental health constraints.”
The overall trend here is a rowback from the tolerant approach taken toward mental health since the 1990s — especially in politics, where people had been shamed out of public life for treatable conditions. Shame is back, and deployed when it’s most convenient.
Notable
- In The Hill, Ellen Mitchell reports on the screenings the Department of Defense is starting to process out service members with gender dysphoria.
- In Chalkbeat, Kalyn Belsha looks at the administration’s mental health funding cuts for schools.
- In American Affairs, Musa al-Gharbi investigates why “conservatives tend to be happier and more well-adjusted than liberals.”