This Week in Doonesbury: Mental Health in the Age of Trump

I’m not going to write about myself very much in these pages, but I will note here that I read this week’s Doonesbury strip through the lens of my own mental health issues, namely a case of generalized anxiety disorder that I’ve been carrying around for quite a while. Things got really bad earlier this year on this front and I’m working on putting them back together.

As I’ve been reading, listening, talking and learning about mental health, I’m beginning to understand how mental health is not simply about what’s happening in a particular individual’s brain. Our mental health struggles and the discourses that shape them play a key role in determining how we can live and enjoy our lives; they can also be read as symptoms of the larger issues that affect a society, or parts of it. Like with physical health, mental health outcomes reflect broader political, cultural, environmental, and economic dynamics. Race, class, gender, sexuality: categories like these play big roles in determining the state of a person’s mental health and in how their mental health issues will be diagnosed and treated (or not diagnosed/left untreated).
Today as I began drafting this post, the comics artist Lauren Weinstein posted this sketch on Twitter :

This comic and GBT’s 16 July offering both deal with a key dynamic shaping mental health outcomes for people today: a widely-shared sense among diverse elements of society that we are fast approaching a crisis point that may well be existential in nature. I recently asked a grad student in psychology if she knew of any studies linking Trump’s election to an increase in people seeking mental health care. She didn’t, but she thought it would be a great topic to research. In reality, while there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence to go around suggesting that we are having a collective mental breakdown caused by the Trump presidency, the fears and anxieties I’m talking about did not originate with the campaign and eventual election of Donald Trump; the optimism for the long-term well-being of humanity that bloomed with the end of the Cold War long ago died a death by a thousand cuts dealt by terrorist attacks, illegal wars, bloody occupations, and torture regimes, all unfolding on a planet getting too hot to sustain human beings. That said, the dawn of Trump’s America has played a huge role in amplifying those feelings and intensifying their contagion. And it must be noted that the fears and anxieties that have become seemingly more widespread and intense over the past year or so are felt especially acutely by people who occupy more fragile positions in our society: women, people of colour, LGBT people, migrants. Some of us are already closer to that crisis point than others. At the end of the day, however, we are all the child in Weinstein’s dark vision, staring blankly at the Thing That Will Kill Us All But We Can’t Do Anything About. We are all, as Trudeau says this week, B.D., looking to a trusted authority to tell us what the hell is going on.
On a less abstract level, B.D.’s regular check-in with his therapist Elias cracked me up for two reasons. First, the two-panel “throwaway” gag that starts the strip. This is me and a lot of people I know, afraid that we’ll miss out on the Next Big Revelation while we’re away from our phones. Trump news is like heroin to us, and, like any dope fiend, we need to make sure we have our next fix lined up.
Second: The rest of the strip. I have had pretty much this exact conversation with my psychiatrist.
Thanks to Lauren R. Weinstein for permission to reproduce her work; check out her comic Normel Person on the Village Voice website.