Trump-Induced Anxiety Disorder
Yes, it’s a real psychiatric diagnosis! And the resultant fear of vulgar kakistocracy is justified!
I have an American friend, a fellow expat, who each day looks increasingly haggard and gaunt. Is he dying of cancer? I wonder but am afraid to ask. Finally, one morning over coffee near his office (he works for an international consulting firm), he confides in me:
“I have insomnia.”
“You do look tired,” I allow, “but I didn’t want to say anything.”
“I usually sleep like a baby, haven’t had insomnia for years. The last time I couldn’t sleep was back in college, when I would have these nightmares about dying, so intense and vivid and horrible that I’d wake up and then not be able to go back to sleep.”
My hand involuntarily, consolingly reaches across the table to touch his.
“You know the feeling. I guess everybody in college goes through that…you know…lying awake at night worrying and wondering about the meaning of life. Not just any life, life in general…but your own life…when you finally come to grips with the realization that yes, you, too, will die someday.”
I squeeze his hand and look into his eyes, waiting for him to tell me, to share, whatever it is that is causing his sleeplessness now. Trouble at work? Money problems? A recent diagnosis of a worrisome illness?
“Trump!” he finally says, spitting it out, shaking his head.
Funny, I think to myself, recalling an article I just read about therapists reporting an increasing number of patients feeling Trump-induced anxiety.
People with anxiety disorders tend to imagine that catastrophe is imminent, but in this case they may not be wrong. “You can’t pathologize this anxiety,” says Andrea Gitter, a New York psychotherapist and member of the faculty at the Women’s Therapy Centre Institute…. Therapists try to talk their patients through their Trump Terror, while hoping not to succumb to it themselves!
In my friend’s case, the Trump Terror is not so much about the world’s most powerful country becoming a kakistocracy — a form of government in which the worst persons are in power — but about his very sense of self.
“Trump as a person is a repudiation of I everything I value and have been taught to believe,” he sighs, and then taps his fist on the table as he lists all the character flaws:
- Acquisition of wealth at the expense of others.
- Ostentatious materialism. “Vulgar displays that rival Saddam Hussein’s palaces.”
- Racism. Misogyny.
- Lack of intellectual curiosity.
- Bragard. I have a big brain, Trump actually said that! “If it weren’t so sacrey, it would be laughable.”
- Not honoring debts. Self-dealing.
- Incapable of remorse, or feeling guilty.
- Liar. Lying so frequently that he’s no longer even aware of facts or any notion of truth. “At least with Hillary, you can detect a consciousness, a conscience, an uncomfortable self-awareness when she, lawyer-like, parses her words too much.”
“If Trump wins — and he might! — what does this say about my country? About me, a citizen of that country? I spend all my time now already trying to explain to disbelieving Europeans how a Trump could happen.” As he talks, I notice that his sleepless eyes now seem especially red.
I don’t know what to say to my friend. No words can help.
Very close to tears, he says: “I now understand how Native Americans must have felt when all their beliefs and values were upended by alien invaders conquering and displacing all they loved. Their air and water polluted, their lands paved over. Better to be killed, perhaps.”
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This is not my first encounter with Trump-induced anxiety. Indeed, I’ve felt it myself, and a couple of months attempted to come to grips with it by naming it Trumpschmerz. An especially painful form of Weltschmerz!
