Studies: Young Liberal Women Are the Most Mentally Ill Demographic

An infographic showing a connection between age, gender, and political affiliation to a mental health diagnosis has sparked debate on social media.

The historic data from a 2020 Pew American Trends Panel study asked respondents whether a doctor or healthcare provider had ever told them that they have a mental health condition.

Results show that white liberal women aged 18-29 were the most likely to have been diagnosed with a mental health condition with 56.3% of respondents answering ‘yes’ in response to the question. This dropped to 27.3% when 18-29-year-old conservative women were questioned.

Trends show a decrease among all political affiliations in older age groups, with the exception being white moderate women aged 30-49 (32.8%) compared to the 18-29-year-olds of the same political viewpoint (28.4%).

White conservatives over 65 were around ten percentage points lower than their liberal counterparts, with only 4.5% of conservative men aged 65 and over answering ‘yes’.

The same study the tweet above is quoting from also had the following statistics for ideology and mental illness not divided by race, and they show the same pattern:

This is hardly the only research coming to this conclusion. In fact, all research on this topic comes to the same conclusion. The results from the paper “Mental Illness and the Left,” which was published in Mankind Quarterly, showed the same correlation between a person’s gender + ideology and mental illness.

And Gallup:

Some factors such as age are perhaps more explainable than others. Scientific research and a changed approach to mental health conditions in recent years could be a factor as to why more young people have been diagnosed, while women are nearly twice as likely be diagnosed with depression than men.

Political ideology is less well-evidenced, prompting social media users to discuss supposed discrepancies in the data. Some suggested generational differences played a factor…