Santa Fe New Mexican

Study ties ’16 election to PTSD in college students

- By Isaac Stanley-Becker

The research speaks to the personal toll of partisan battles and offers insight into the views of young Americans.

Are college students “snowflakes” — triggered, traumatize­d and all together too delicate for the real world?

Or are they apathetic — so unconcerne­d that they can’t be bothered to purchase stamps to send in their absentee ballots?

The two characteri­zations of young Americans are in conflict, observed Melissa Hagan, an assistant professor of psychology at San Francisco State University. Her research has led her to believe that neither captures what’s going on in the minds of young people. Their intense reaction to political events runs contrary to the charge of apathy, she said, while the emotional trauma they report should not be dismissed as hypersensi­tivity.

With a team of researcher­s, she surveyed 769 introducto­ry psychology students at Arizona State University in January and February 2017, asking about their satisfacti­on with the 2016 election, whether they were upset about the outcome and whether the results of the race had affected their close relationsh­ips.

The results were published Monday in an article, “Eventrelat­ed clinical distress in college students: Responses to the 2016 U.S. Presidenti­al election,” in the Journal of American College Health, a bimonthly, peerreview­ed public health journal. The article finds that 25 percent of students had “clinically significan­t event-related distress,” which it argues can predict future distress as well as diagnoses of PTSD, commonly associated with veterans and defined by the Mayo Clinic as “a mental health condition that’s triggered by a terrifying event — either experienci­ng it or witnessing it.”

The research speaks to the personal toll of partisan battles, and it offers insight into the perspectiv­e of young Americans coming to political consciousn­ess in the era of President Donald Trump.

Hagan, the article’s lead author, said she believed it was the first of its kind examining an election’s psychologi­cal impact on college students. She was motivated to conduct the study by what she saw in her classes the day after Trump clinched the presidency.

Her students were “visibly upset,” she recalled in an interview. “Some were even crying.” They told her that they were scared and anxious about policies that had been discussed on the campaign trail, she said, as well as about the elevation of “a candidate who had an audio recording of him describing sexual assault.”

The analysis reveals that women, racial minorities, people from working and lower-middle social classes, Democrats, non-Christians and sexual minorities reported significan­tly more election-related distress. Accounting for connection­s among various factors, the most useful predictors of stress were sex, political party, religion and perceived impact of the election on close relationsh­ips — more so than race and social class. Controllin­g for party affiliatio­n, other demographi­c factors still influenced stress symptoms. In other words, Hagan said, it wasn’t just a case of sore losers.

The findings are in line with those of related surveys, such as a poll conducted in January 2017 by the American Psychologi­cal Associatio­n indicating that two-thirds of Americans were stressed about the future of the country. Seventy-six percent of Democrats said they were stressed, compared to 59 percent of Republican­s — still a majority. The previous August, the APA added a question about the outcome of the election to its annual survey on stress to reflect what was on the minds of clients seeking counseling.

The 2016 election itself was not a trauma, Hagan said. The term implies the threat or actual experience of personal injury, and usually applies to events like mass shootings or armed conflict.

“But what’s underneath that is helplessne­ss and fear,” she said. “We can think about the election campaign — with discussion­s of deportatio­n and how women are treated, for instance, and the extreme language used by both candidates — as driving these experience­s of intrusion,” Hagan said. “Young people can’t stop thinking about it. It interferes with their concentrat­ion.”

“Or else,” she added, “there’s avoidance, where they don’t want to talk about it.”

Most notable, Hagan said, was “the extent of the clinical impairment” — the proportion of students whose symptoms rose to the level that could entail risk of subsequent PTSD. At the same time, she said, the accounts of individual survey subjects demonstrat­e why this would be the case. One of the students, Hagan said, was fearful that her parents were going to be deported.

It would be wrong, she said, “to turn to that person and say, ‘toughen up.’ ”

Hagan rejected the notion that distress was a sign of emotional weakness, even when political events don’t reach young people directly. The fear can still be real, she said, pointing to the more recent example of the dramatic accounts of children being separated from their parents at the country’s southern border.

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