Trump Anxiety Disorder

Share this article

It’s what Harvard medical researchers call Trump Derangement Syndrome. “In a 2017 essay for a book co-edited by psychiatrists from Harvard Medical School and the Yale School of Medicine, clinical psychologist Jennifer Panning of Evanston, Ill., called the condition ‘Trump Anxiety Disorder,’ distinguishing it from a generalized anxiety disorder because ‘symptoms were specific to the election of Trump and the resultant unpredictable sociopolitical climate,” Matt Kwong reported for the CBC. “Though not an official diagnosis, the symptoms include feeling a loss of control and helplessness, and fretting about what’s happening in the country and spending excessive time on social media, she said.”

It might not surprise laymen that this condition is particularly acute in the Washington, D. C. metropolitan area. “Is he gonna blow us all up?,” one of Elisabeth LaMotte’s patients asked recently.

“It was a rhetorical question — one that predated Trump’s threats of a showdown with Iran this week,” Kwong writes. “But if the question wasn’t meant in earnest, the politically induced anxiety LaMotte is hearing about from her clients certainly is, says the founder of the D.C. Counselling and Psychotherapy Center.”

“She refers to it as a ‘collective anxiety’ among patients who feel on edge about how potentially dire the president’s decisions could be.”