This morning we got a little deeper into analyzing the mental condition of Texas fascist Bryan Slaton than intended. A former pastor, vicious MAGAt and child rapist, Rep. Slaton is also a compulsive overeater, a condition his own religion teaches against. Yesterday, another former evangelic pastor, John Pavlovitz wrote about the MAGA mental health crisis, “a sprawling homegrown mental health crisis, the genesis of which can be traced to a single Wednesday morning in November of 2016. They are part of a growing national neurosis brought on by a continual assault on decency, sanity, and goodness by those in power.” Slaton is a poster child for that description— a perpetrator as well as a victim.
“Mental health is a daily battle, even on our best days,” wrote Pavlovitz. “During any given year in America, one in five adults (nearly 44 million people) experiences mental illness—10 million of these people finding their lives fundamentally impacted by their internal, invisible maladies.
The personal toll of these diseases is almost incalculable: debilitating mood disorders, propensity toward addiction, susceptibility to physical illness, and regular feelings of isolation and hopelessness. Nearly 45, 000 people die here by suicide each year, with 25 attempts for each of these deaths. Many of these premature passings are have direct or indirect lines to undiagnosed, or treated but ultimately insurmountable sickness. On any given moment, millions of people are fighting a battle in their own heads just to stay here. This is all under normal circumstances— and these are not at all normal circumstances.”
These are days that tax people’s already burdened mental defense systems and emotional reserves by relentlessly targeting their places of vulnerability:
the real and manufactured emergencies designed by the former president and his current party, the daily incessant legislative attacks on vulnerable people groups, the collective cruelty the normalized acts of violence the forty-fifth president not only tolerates but incites, the untethered behavior regarding matters of national security, environmental stewardship, and human rights.
In other words, the GOP is unwell and lots of good, already hurting people see it clearly. They understand the gravity of these moments for our nation and they are rightly terrified by the lack of accountability, the absence of conscience, and the poverty of empathy.
Men and women already prone to depression and anxiety, those normally driven to despair without any discernible cause or reason— now also have objective data that makes that hopelessness quite sensible.
The MAGA movement is making otherwise mentally healthy people emotionally sick, and making ill people much worse. Like forcing a person suffering from Asthma into an enclosed space and making them exert themselves over and over without rest; surrounding them with every allergen and trigger their illness has— and with great joy, watching them gradually suffocate.
And a growing number of otherwise well people are developing a form of PTSD from continual exposure to a group of people in power whose malevolence and contempt for life are beyond comprehension. They too are finding the space within their own heads to be a dangerous one as they live within it all.
What worse, the GOP’s boundless assaults on human rights, their vicious crusades against science, their continual gaslighting of otherwise sensible people, and their reckless fake news conspiracy theories, aren’t just making those who oppose them prone to head sickness— they’re doing the same to his supporters.
Republican leaders are playing on their own rank-and file’s paranoia, instability, and fear; ratifying their latent or active neuroses, and justifying the ways they now act out in both emotional and physical violence.
We are seeing daily mass shootings in school, churches, subways, city streets, and grocery stores, by people whose own illnesses and frailties have been triggered by the incendiary language and calculated lies continually perpetuated from the top.
America is sickly— and half of its leaders are fine with that.
In an environment populated by emotionally fragile and mentally unhealthy people, it’s much easier to act without accountability and to continue to take away resources, personal liberties, and human rights without recompense.
Mental illness is rarely treated with the same urgency and seriousness as physical illness, and the dismissal is even more profound in days when people feeling deep sadness and great empathy for others are derided as “snowflakes.” The callousness of these days makes brain maladies nonexistent, or worse— worthy of ridicule.
The former President and those who support him in Congress are counting on sick people growing too tired from pushing back, too overwhelmed fighting their inner demons, and too hopeless at the story to go on.
We can’t allow that.
…We are not well, America. Many of our leaders are really not well. We need to oppose the ugliness that collectively threatens us. We need to vote for our health and for our lives. We need to get well together.
And this isn’t just about Donald Trump. In what world are Mike Pence, Marjorie Traitor Greene, Gym Jordan, Bob Good, Paul Gosar, Matt Gaetz, Elise Stefanik, Lauren Boebert (and her flasher husband), Matt Rosendale, Scott Perry, even remotely sane? What a shame, though, that their type of mental illness doesn’t lead to suicide frequently enough. Among the right-wing members of Congress who did kill themselves were conservative Pennsylvania prohibitionist Samuel Kendall (who shot himself in his Cannon office in 1923 after losing reelection), North Carolina anti-Choice fanatic, racist and protégé of Jesse Helms, John East (1986), and viciously racist Indiana Republican Douglas Elliott (who offed himself after being defeated by a mainstream conservative in the primary).
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