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Comment by wyager | Hacker News Reader

> for the record, mental health is known to be much worse in the far-right and far-right libertarians

Every paper I've seen on the subject has pretty much monotonic improvement in reported mental health outcomes almost all the way to the right, and if there's any non-monotonicity, it's insufficient to come even close to the reported negative mental health outcomes on the far left. This is not a formal scientific paper, but the SSC survey has the benefit of tighter granularity and more heterodoxy than most sources. https://mobile.twitter.com/phl43/status/1227338353101672450

Low granularity research from gallup: https://news.gallup.com/poll/102943/republicans-report-much-...

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Interesting data points, but in isolation polling seems to be a rather poor method for determining this.

More conservative viewpoints are also associated with higher stigmatization of mental health conditions[1] and one indisputable measure of a mental health crisis (suicides) is more prevalent in rural areas compared to urban[2].

This seems like an obvious confounding variable. If you poll people have they been formally diagnosed with a mental health disorder, and one group of people refuses to seek treatment for it in the first place due to stigma, then _of course_ fewer of them are formally diagnosed.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6600024/ [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8909802/

A shallow search seems to support that people with right leaning ideologies tend to stigmatize depression more and to not support mental health help and intervention.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6600024/ https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2378023120921652

A person who stigmatizes mental illness would be more likely to not seek help and would not admit that they have problems in a public survey.

As an example of this, the slate star codex post shows that alt-right people reported a very low percentage of diagnosed depression. The popularity of Jordan Peterson and his videos in that space is a clear signal that a lot of these people are seeking ways to deal with mental health problems. Even more, they're not looking for them through official channels, but through online celebrities and communities.

I would be very glad to be corrected with data on this as I'm not an expert, but I think it's an important point to consider when discussing mental illnesses where self-reporting makes a big difference in their diagnosis.

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