The Kids Are Not Alright

Election meltdowns reveal a long-festering crisis

If you were moderately online in the week after Donald Trump’s reelection, you probably saw a number of distraught TikTok reaction clips. With a few exceptions, they were created by young people, primarily young women. Some were teary, some were screaming. Some videos felt elaborately staged, others felt like an incoherent outpouring of emotion. Some had an instructional flavor, urging everyone to “be making a plan depending on which category you’re in, because they’re putting us in categories…You need to be thinking about what’s he going to do, what’s this administration going to do to target me?” In particular, women were encouraged to hoard abortion pills or break up with Trump-voting lovers. (One somewhat older woman told married women to seek divorce now, before no-fault divorce becomes illegal.) And a few were openly violent, including two girls who fantasized about shooting or bludgeoning male Trump voters, as well as a girl who imagined herself as a hospice nurse harassing elderly Trump voters.

In addition to these reactions, there were anecdotal reports of a dramatic spike in hotline calls and ER visits from the mentally disturbed. You can scroll through some in this Reddit discussion under a now-deleted post allegedly reporting a post-election suicide in the user’s family. All such shakily sourced reports should, of course, be taken with a chunk of salt, but after watching those TikToks, I don’t find it wildly implausible.

Journalist Mark Halperin predicted this in a prescient interview on Tucker Carlson’s show several weeks ago. A second Trump win, he judged, would spark “the greatest mental health crisis in the history of the country,” causing people to question all of their human connections, all their visions of the future. He predicted suicide attempts, broken marriages, violence. He was completely serious.

And yet, it’s been said that Trump’s first emergence on the world stage didn’t create so much as reveal the rifts in our sociopolitical fabric. I believe something similar is true now. Trump hasn’t caused a mental health crisis. The crisis was already here. The kids were already not alright.