Voter mental health is scarred by polarization, pandemic and economy

Four years and several crises separate the 2018 polls from the election scheduled for October 2. The polarization in that period was followed by a pandemic and the intensification of inequality in the country, with direct reflexes on the mental health of Brazilians.

For psychologists and psychiatrists heard by the Sheetwomen, black people, with less education and low income, in addition to minorities, such as LGBTQIA+ and indigenous people, were the most affected.

The dissemination of polls on voting intentions, for example, as shown by a report by the Sheet, has already generated anxiety in voters. Experts believe that, as in 2018, complaints are likely to increase as polling day approaches.

At that time, conditions such as anxiety, anguish, paranoia and depression were common diagnoses. However, there are no broader studies that show how the elections impacted the population’s mental health, say professionals in the area.

In the United States, the APA (American Psychological Association) has published the report “Stress in America” ​​annually since 2007.

The survey conducted in 2020, the year of the dispute between Joe Biden and then-President Donald Trump, recorded an increase in stress compared to the previous election, when the Republican won Democrat Hillary Clinton.

In 2016, 59% of Republicans responded that the election period was a source of burnout, compared to 55% of Democrats. In 2020, the rate reached 76% among Democrats, while for Republicans it was 67%.

Despite the lack of studies and statistics on Brazilians, there is a shared perception among professionals that political polarization began to appear as a factor of stress and anxiety in 2018 or, for some, as early as 2016, with the situation of street protests and the impeachment of then president Dilma Rousseff.

The campaign speeches and the support shown to candidates from opposing camps led to ruptures in personal relationships, both within the family and between friends and co-workers.

“When you have this decreased capacity for psychotic belonging and a feeling of decreased social feeling, you have an affect on your mental health”, says psychoanalyst Christian Dunker, professor at the Institute of Psychology at USP.

Reactions also vary depending on each person’s history.

Psychiatrist Vanessa Flabrea Favaro, director of the outpatient clinics of the Institute of Psychiatry at the Hospital das Clínicas, Faculty of Medicine, USP, says that she treated a patient who was psychotic and absorbed all the atmosphere of electoral tension, failing to leave the house, with fear to be arrested.

In Porto Alegre, psychiatrist Pedro Lima says that at that time he assisted a person in panic saying that the PT could win the election and that a ship had arrived from Cuba to buy the election.

Likewise, it also received people terrified by the possibility of Jair Bolsonaro’s victory.

Over time, electoral anxieties gave way to other issues that became latent in the life of Brazilians. The scenario of uncertainty from the declaration of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020, as well as the wave of deaths and isolation generated the alert about the damage to mental health.

According to the WHO (World Health Organization), rates of depression and anxiety rose 25% worldwide during the pandemic, but only 2% of national health budgets and less than 1% of all international aid were devoted to mental health.

Studies carried out in 2020 in Brazil brought different results.

A survey carried out by UFRGS (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul) through an online questionnaire, applied from May to July 2020, on psychiatric disorders in the period was answered by almost 2,000 people, most of them women (84%).

Of the total number of participants, 82% had moderate to severe symptoms of anxiety and 68% of depression. The most impacted were young people, people with low income and education.

“In that first moment, the impact was greater, because we were in that situation of great fear, of insecurity, not knowing what was going to happen to the future. There was no prospect of a vaccine”, says professor Adriane Ribeiro Rosa, coordinator of the study and researcher in the area of ​​mental health at Hospital de Clínicas de Porto Alegre.

At PUC-SP, psychoanalyst Adriana Barbosa Pereira made a project that collected more than a thousand reports of dreams during the first year of the pandemic, of different ages, used as a reference for psychoanalysts in the book “Dream: Figurar o Terror, Sustentar o Desejo “, organized by her and the psychologist Nelson Ernesto Coelho Júnior.

Among the dreams related to the health crisis, Adriane says that reports have appeared linked to political figures, such as Bolsonaro.

Another survey carried out by the USP School of Medicine, which evaluated participants in the Longitudinal Study of Adult Health (Elsa Brasil) –employees from different universities monitored since 2008–, indicated that the crisis did not significantly alter the occurrence of mental disorders.

There were 2,117 participants in the survey applied in three periods, between May and December 2020. According to the results, the rate of mental disorder ranged between 24% and 21%. Depression rates dropped from 3.3% to 2.8%, and anxiety disorders ranged from 14% to 8%.

The comparison with the patients’ history is a differential of the study, according to the psychiatrist José Gallucci Neto, who integrated the research and is from the Psychiatry Institute of the Hospital das Clínicas of FMUSP.

On the other hand, he draws attention to the fact that the mental health of Brazilians was already bad before the pandemic.

The occupational profile of the exhibition, according to him, was the major limiting factor, but despite this, it was possible to identify a subgroup with people at increased risk of mental disorder, composed of women, people of non-white race, with low education, and mental illnesses, which shows the uneven impact of the pandemic.

The psychiatrist also sees a portion of the population more fragile in terms of mental health at the moment, highlighting the impacts caused by impoverishment, instability and political polarization and by the mistrust fueled in social networks.

A survey carried out by IMDs (Instituto Mobilidade e Desenvolvimento Social) showed that 47.3 million Brazilians, equivalent to 22.3% of the population, ended the year in poverty, which means living with a daily income of US$ 1 .9, about R$10, or less.

The most affected portion was the black population, which corresponds to 73% of the total.

“The economic impact is very large and triggers a series of delicate clinical conditions”, says psychologist and master in clinical psychology Lucas Veiga, who assists black patients in Rio de Janeiro through the practice of black psychology.

Veiga says that therapy alone is not capable of reducing the anxiety of a mother who does not know if she will be able to feed her children, arguing that psychic suffering is a political problem.

“We have seen more cases of anxiety, from moderate to more critical, such as panic disorders, increased rates of depression, because it generates a very great feeling of impotence for people not to be able to pay the house bills”, he says.

Regarding political discourse, he notes a fear that the electoral process will be violent or that a coup will occur if President Jair Bolsonaro is not reelected.

“The question that remains to me is how do we pose the questions that need to be posed in a debate between candidates without using their place to inflame voters for a confrontation between voters, because then we would experience a civil problem on a scale that We can’t even predict it.”