When Rebecca McFaul woke up in her small farmhouse in Logan, Utah, on a cold January day, she felt the same way she’d been feeling for months: “A certain kind of terror and horror at it all.” Most of her family lives in Minnesota, and for weeks, she’d watched from afar as families were taken by agents, activists were shot and tear gas hung in the air.

A music professor at Utah State University, she’d spent the day with her students, but struggled to focus. Then she came home and read more bad news, this time, a piece in the newspaper about two Maga influencers railing against the dangers of compassion in response to the detainment of 5-year-old Liam Ramos in Minneapolis. “It was such a betrayal on every level,” McFaul said. “Of sisterhood, of motherhood, of decency.”

It had been a year that already seemed long with terrible things in the news. But for McFaul, this was the last straw. She was filled with a rage she hadn’t known was in her. She couldn’t shake the thought: “This is seismic. This is just all upside down.”

A typical therapist might say McFaul was depressed and give her some exercises to regulate her nervous system or some medication to take the edge off. But the queer scholar and writer Ann Cvetkovitch has a different name for McFaul’s dark mood. She is experiencing classic symptoms of “political depression” – the knowledge that the world is falling apart paired with the “sense that customary forms of political response … are no longer working either to change the world or to make us feel better”.

Political depression might look like traditional depression – the same hopelessness, despair and shutdown – but its source is different. It doesn’t come from within, at least not primarily, Cvetkovitch wrote in her 2012 book, Depression: A Public Feeling. It comes from the violence, collapse or unjustness of the world around us.

In recent years, political depression has infiltrated the public discourse, the private consciousness and the therapist’s office. Two-thirds of respondents in a 2024 LifeStance Health survey said they talk about politics or elections with their therapists. Therapists, too, are noticing an influx of clients seeking support for political stress. The day after the 2024 election, platforms like Zocdoc and Spring Health saw a surge in mental health appointments and new member accounts, Forbes reported. Therapy practices host blogs devoted to political depression and anxiety, with some therapists specializing in the treatment of political woes. Universities from Georgetown to Missouri State have responded to political anxieties on campus with post-election “coping spaces” that offer everything from distraction – Lego sets and coloring books – to phone-free zones and free counseling services.

Studies show political stress takes a very real toll on people’s mental and physical health. In a survey study tracking the health impacts of politics between 2017 and 2020, Kevin Smith, a political scientist, and his colleagues found that political stress was linked to serious fatigue, sleep loss, anger, compulsive behaviors and even suicidal thinking. Young, left-leaning and politically engaged people were hit hardest.

Brett Ford, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Toronto who studies stress and emotion, says politics has become a form of chronic stress. “Chronic stressors are large-scale, they don’t have clear endpoints, they feel out of your hands, and they reliably evoke negative emotions,” she said.

Part of Ford’s work involves identifying practices that help people reduce their level of political distress. Turning off the news and distraction help, as do certain kinds of cognitive reframing, but Ford said there’s a tradeoff to tuning out, because the same strategies that help people cope can also lower people’s motivation to act.

The key for Ford is finding strategies that protect people’s mental health without encouraging them to check out. “We need people to have to be OK in terms of their mental health, and we also need them to be engaged,” Ford said.

Feeling bad about the state of the world doesn’t feel good. But Ford says it is realistic – and even motivating. “Negative emotions are a really consistent predictor of political engagement and action,” Ford said. When people volunteer, donate and protest, positive emotions like compassion, admiration and pride sustain their work, she said, and taking action leads to more feelings of agency, efficacy and alignment with their values.

“If we let those emotions be and just allow them, [we can] consider ways of coping that connect us to our community, that help us feel engaged, that help us feel a sense of agency or control,” Ford said.

Increasingly, therapists say this kind of political distress is showing up in their offices, whether they invite it in or not. What once might have been treated as background noise – the news, the election cycle, the culture war – is now the presenting problem itself. And they have had to adapt.

“A person does not exist in a vacuum,” said Shahem Mclaurin, a licensed clinical social worker, therapist and mental health influencer. “When they come to you about, say, anxiety, it’s not just them experiencing anxiety alone. They’re experiencing that anxiety within a system.”

A former youth organizer in Baltimore who now has a private clinical practice in New York, Maclaurin has seen a lot of that sort of anxiety lately. Some clients come in angry. Some are frustrated. Some can’t name what’s causing their feelings, but others know exactly what’s wrong. On 6 January 2020, Maclaurin was in a session with a client as protesters stormed the Capitol. His client was trying to talk about regular things, but had to stop. He couldn’t focus on himself. More recently, when Minneapolis resident Renee Nicole Good was shot by immigration agents, it was Mclaurin who had to ask his clients for a break so he could process what had happened.

To Mclaurin, bringing politics into his therapy room doesn’t feel out of bounds. It feels essential. “These things impact all of us, and pretending like they don’t have an impact on your clients’ personal lives is kind of ridiculous,” he said.

So much of mainstream therapy tries to help the client accept and adapt to the society they live in, Mclaurin said. And that makes him roll his eyes. “I think there are some things we shouldn’t accept,” he said. “You shouldn’t accept that the world is so fucked up, you should be aware, and you should find ways to get involved to make your life easier.”

That can look like helping a Black client understand that their unemployment is partly a result of economic racism and discriminatory housing practices, or using appointment time to help a low-income client find affordable housing. It can look like making an Instagram reel answering a client’s question about how to defend themselves from hate and bigotry.

But Mclaurin says his main job is to help people to practice what he calls “the choice of hope”, to remind people to connect with their bigger communities and believe in their capacity to change things. “One person standing outside worrying about a topic is just a person yelling,” he said. “But when it’s a group of people, it’s a protest.”

Community – along with humor – is also how Cvetkovich responded to a growing sense of political malaise as a young activist. Starting in the early aughts, she began hosting public support groups for people overwhelmed by the state of the world and helped to organize cheeky events such as the International Day of the Politically Depressed, where activists dressed in bathrobes to express their world-weariness and passed out buttons that said, “Depressed? It Might Be Political!”

For Cvetkovich, the point is to slow down and be together with others who feel similar things. “Sometimes we just need some space to reckon with how sad or disturbed we are about what’s going on,” she said. “And that might be the goal for the day.”

Community and creativity are the answer for McFaul as well. She has no interest in individual therapy. Instead, she and her husband, Rob Davies, a physics professor, try to use art and education to inspire their students to create a different world. Together, they’ve collaborated on the Crossroads Project, a performance that weaves together science, art and music to help people understand the perils the world is facing and act in its defense.

After their first performance, one of McFaul’s music students ran up and thanked her. “He said, ‘I’ve been waiting for my professors to say anything about this,’” McFaul recalled. “‘None of them have ever acknowledged what’s wrong before.’”

McFaul and Davies believe that telling the truth is the first step in addressing political depression. Mclaurin does the same for his clients. “I validate their feelings,” he said. “I hold the space. I tell them that I’m fucking frustrated too. I don’t lie to them, and I don’t pretend to be a robot. I let them know that it’s human, and I share that humanity with them.”