Therapy culture is turning politics into a national nervous breakdown

Not long ago, a patient tried to explain to me why fantasies about PresidentDonald Trumpbeing killed didn’t really bother her.She wasn’t threatening violence herself, nor was she someone with a history of aggression.In many areas of life, she considered herself compassionate and morally thoughtful.But as she spoke, what struck me was how easily she justified sentiments that, directed toward almost any other public figure, would have seemed obviously disturbing.

“He’s dangerous,” she told me.“He destroys people’s lives.”

What she was really describing was moral permission, notpolitics.

As a psychotherapist, I increasingly see people interpreting political disagreement through a framework usually reserved for emotional threat and psychological harm.Opponents are no longer simply viewed as wrong.They’re experienced as toxic, dangerous, unsafe, narcissistic ormorally beyond redemption.Once that shift happens, the emotional intensity rises quickly.People stop feeling like fellow citizens with different ideas and start feeling like threats.

A THERAPIST’S WARNING: TRUMP DIDN’T BREAK AMERICA — PERMANENT OUTRAGE DID

This is one of the central concerns I explore in my book, “Therapy Nation.” Over the past decade, therapeutic language has escaped the therapist’s office and reshaped how Americans interpret politics, relationships, workplaces,parentingand everyday conflict.

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Concepts like “trauma,” “safety,” “validation,” “triggering” and “boundaries” can be useful in the right context.But when applied too broadly, they begin subtly transforming disagreement itself into something psychologically destabilizing.That shift has enormous consequences.

Americans once tended to view political disagreement as evidence that people saw the world differently.Now disagreement itself gets interpreted as evidence that something is psychologically or morally wrong with the other person.Politics stops being about persuasion and starts becoming about emotional protection from perceived psychological threats.

HOW THE MEDIA, IN THE DIGITAL AGE, HELP FUEL A CLIMATE OF ANGER AND VIOLENCE

Once someone is viewed as a villain, the normal constraints that govern behavior begin weakening.Curiosity drops off.Fairness becomes conditional.Reactions that might otherwise feel excessive start to feel justified, even righteous.From the inside, it feels like clarity.In therapy, when someone moves into that kind of rigid, all-or-nothing thinking, it usually signals a loss of psychological flexibility.Complexity collapses intoemotionally satisfying certainty.The cost is perspective.

Americans once tended to view political disagreement as evidence that people saw the world differently.Now disagreement itself gets interpreted as evidence that something is psychologically or morally wrong with the other person. 

More and more, I see this in patients who describecutting off friends or familymembers over politics, not because of mistreatment or abuse, but because the relationship itself has become emotionally intolerable.When you slow those conversations down, the justification often rests almost entirely on what their beliefs are assumed to represent.

That mindset is no longer confined to private conversations.Licensed clinicians now appear on national TV and social media encouraging people todistance themselves from familymembers over political differences, reframing disagreement itself as a form of emotional harm rather than something mature adults should learn to navigate.

MORNING GLORY: TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME WAS REAL.SO IS ‘LONG TDS’

What people casually call “Trump Derangement Syndrome” reflects part of this broader dynamic.It isn’t a formal clinical diagnosis, but the underlying psychology is very real: the tendency for political disagreement to become emotionally consuming, morally absolute and psychologically destabilizing.And this dynamic isn’t limited to critics of Donald Trump.Similar patterns emerge anytime people become convinced that opposing views are not simply mistaken, but illegitimate.

Psychotherapist Jonathan Alpert and his new book ‘Therapy Nation’ which wil be published by Hanover Square Press on May 19, 2026.(unknown)

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The more emotionally reinforcing narratives people consume through social media, political media and online communities, the more psychologically convincing those narratives become.Certainty begins replacing reflection.

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That certainty feels moral rather than political.People believe they are standing up for something essential and righteous.And from a clinical standpoint, that resembles a cognitive distortion: a way of interpreting reality that simplifies complexity while narrowing judgment and reducing people’s ability to tolerate ambiguity, discomfort or opposing views without feeling psychologically threatened.

HOW AMERICA CAN LEAD ITSELF OUT OF ITS MENTAL HEALTH CRISIS

In “Therapy Nation,” I argue that therapy culture has taught Americans to reinterpret ordinary discomfort through the language of psychological harm.Discomfort gets treated as something to eliminate rather than something people can work through.Over time, that lowers people’s threshold for what feels threatening.

regulate emotion, tolerate discomfortand remain connected to others despite disagreement and uncertainty.It builds resilience rather than avoidance and curiosity rather than certainty.

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A psychologically healthy society cannot function if disagreement itself gets interpreted as emotional injury.Democracies require people tocoexist with others they dislike, distrust and fundamentally disagree with.Once politics becomes organized around emotional threat and moral contamination rather than persuasion and coexistence, democratic life itself becomes harder to sustain.

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A culture that loses the ability to tolerate disagreement eventually loses the ability to govern itself.And a politics organized around emotional safety alone will produce fragility,suspicion, isolation and permanent conflict.

Jonathan Alpert is a psychotherapist in New York City and Washington, DC, and author of the forthcoming book “Therapy Nation.” X: @JonathanAlpert