This Explains So Much

Skeptic Research Center:

Our recent Skeptic Research Center survey of over 3,000 Americans found that 67% of GenZ men and 72% of GenZ women (i.e., those born between 1997-2006) believe “mental health challenges are an important part of my identity.”7 It isn’t just young people, though. After all, American culture—and possibly that of most Western nations—is one dominated by therapy and psychiatry.

 So, while rates of identifying as mentally ill are higher in younger generations, we still found that over a quarter (27%) of Baby Boomer men and over a third (34%) of Baby Boomer women (i.e., those born between 1946-1964) believe that mental health challenges are an important part of their identity (see Figure 1).

Important part of their identity.  That is scary. More importantly for understanding why so many people see the world as it is:

A final interesting finding worth mentioning here is that younger generations and liberals are also more likely to ascribe social status to identifying as mentally ill. Specifically, we found that these demographics more often agreed with the statement, “People with mental health challenges have more important points of view than people without mental health challenges” (see Figure 4).

So it is not only that crazy people were running the asylum in D.C. but they believe that they deserve more power.

What they believe about America also explains their tantrums about policy:

Although we didn’t measure attitudes about income inequality per se, we did measure peoples’ accuracy in estimating poverty rates in America. Specifically, we asked our sample to take a guess as to the percentage of Americans living in poverty (according to the U.S. Census,19 about 11% of Americans live in poverty). Those in our sample vastly overestimated the rate: only 3% of the over 3,000 people that took our representative survey gave the correct answer, and over a third of our sample told us they think the majority of Americans (i.e., > 50%) live in poverty (see Figure 5). Revealingly, a key finding is that those who agreed more strongly that mental health challenges are an important part of their identity tended to give even more extreme overestimates of the poverty rate....

If you had to guess, about what percentage of Black Americans live in poverty? According to the U.S. Census, the correct answer is around 17%, a record low.20 Yet the average guess in our sample was 45% and, again, those who identified more strongly with their mental health challenges tended to give higher estimates (see Figure 6).

Their beliefs about black incarceration rates are similarly wrong. 

A whole political system built around mental illness.  What do you expect?