With a handful of days before #Election2024 delivers final voters to polls in the U.S. on November 5th, Americans’ political stress is hitting fever pitches from all points on the U.S. political spectrum.
Here is the sticker I am using in my journal today, November 1 2024, from Mental Health America.
“Vote as if your mental health depends on it.”
MHA has a portal devoted to 2024 Election Mental Health Resources, including a section with “mental health voter merch” to call out the phenomenon of political stress and support the efforts to deal with the reality that at least one-half of people in the U.S. are dealing with the issue.
I recently discussed the ubiquitous, mainstream condition of political stress in America in 2024 detailing results from the American Psychological Association’s Stress in America perennial report. The study’s subtitle was, “A nation in political turmoil.”
A huge sub-population of U.S. health citizens in said turmoil are Women in America.
Overall, fewer than 2 in 5 U.S. adults feel that government representatives have their best interests in mind, APA found — shown in the bar chart.
Looking a gender differences here, only 1 in 3 women felt that their government representatives had their best interests in mind, compared with 41% of men believing that government rep’s had their collective back.
By August 2024 when this poll was fielded, several facts shaping women’s lives and livelihoods were impacting their worldviews — and it seems their propensity to vote in #Elections2024: among these, the reality that infant mortality was increasing in U.S. states where women’s health care was being limited post-Dobbs, women’s own health threatened (with growing reports of women’s deaths due to lack of medical intervention in places where health care providers felt legally hamstrung from intervening in a timely way). [FYI today JAMA published an essay on how Texas’s banning abortion in 2022 has impacted OB-GYBNs and patient care).
In addition, continued caregiver stress among Sandwich Generation women without a safety net for paid family leave and other forms of support for caring for aging parents or ailing children or mates (a factor prompting VP Harris to discuss a provision for Medicare to cover home care costs).
On a more granular level, check out three key statistics I pulled out of the 2024 Stress in America poll which portray women at greater risk of political/social stress than U.S. men:
- Women were more likely than men (49% versus 38%) to be stressed about how their lives and our democracy will be impacted based on the results of the 2024 Presidential election.
- Women were less likely than men to feel hopeful that the election will lead to a more inclusive society (56% vs. 64%).
- Women were more likely than men to rate money as a significant source of stress (66% compared with 61%).
Signs of early voting hint that more women submitted ballots than men in what’s seen as a significant gender gap, with analysts such as Gallup positing that bodes better for the Democratic party ticket than for the GOP.
Health Populi’s Hot Points: One way to hack political stress, a condition that’s part of my mind- and health-set right now, is to study and read and journal my anxiety and thoughts. I have also been part of the Women Healthcare Leaders for Progress community supporting the candidacy of VP Harris, spelling out our rationale in a letter signed by several hundred of my sisters-in-healthcare over the past several weeks.
One sister in health citizenship I look to from the earliest days of American history is Abigail Adams. Abigail was one of only two women to have been both wife and mother to two U.S. presidents — the second being Barbara Bush.
In yesterday’s Financial Times, Elizabeth Cobbs wrote about America’s long history of a gender gap in politics — reframing Bill Clinton’s famous comment, “It’s the economy, stupid,” to the 2024 update, “It’s gender, stupid.”
Looking to Abigail’s lived experience in an era where women of childbearing age were 40x more likely to die than men, we remind ourselves what is happening in the Post-Dobbs health care world — where both women’s lives in certain U.S. States and infants before birth have been at greater risk of death.
I revisited letters Abigail wrote her beloved John Adams, and he in response to her, from July 1777. She recounted on July 9th that year how she was feeling unwell, confessing,
“I was last night taken with a shaking fit, and am very apprehensive that a life was lost.”
One week later, on 16 July, she wrote to John,
“Join with me my dearest Friend in Gratitude to Heaven, that a life I know you value, has been spared and carried thro Distress and danger altho the dear Infant is nyunbered with its ancestors,,,,My Heart was much set upon a Daughter. I have had a strong perswasion that my desire would be granted me. It was — but to shew me the uncertainty of all sublinary enjoyments cut of e’er I could call it mine.”
John’s response:
“I must confess to you, the Loss of this sweet little Girl, has most tenderly and sensibly affected me. I feel a Grief and Mortificaiton….”
Remember when another Clinton, Hillary, said, “Women’s rights are human rights?”
We can rephrase this Clinton’s words in the current moment to, “Women’s health is men’s health,” too.
Now, we vote as if our Health depends on it….physical, mental, and social.
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