Just a Little Melancholic, Maybe a Little Blue: Mental Health as an Emerging Political Identity

Abstract Is mental health an emerging political identity? In the first study that investigates experiencing mental illness as a political identity, I find that it is. Using a nationally representative survey of Americans fielded in the 2022 CES (N = 1,000), I answer the question: “ For whom is mental illness a political identity?” I adapt Jardina’s work (White Identity Politics. 1st ed. Cambridge University Press, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108645157 .) to create mental health identity and mental health alienation batteries that examine closeness with the ingroup, importance of identification to self, strength of identification within the ingroup, and alienation. I find that people who have experienced mental illness feel close to others who have experienced mental illness. They are also likely to self-categorize as having or having had a mental illness, share a sense of group consciousness with others who have or had mental illness, and recognize the need to work together to change laws that are unfair to people with mental illness. I further find that there is an emerging mental health political identity that is most pronounced among younger (Gen Z) and more liberal Americans. I also find that the emerging mental health identity has political predictors and political consequences. Those who self-categorize and have high scores on the mental health identity and/or alienation scales are just as likely to participate politically and use (social) media, on average, as those who do not self-categorize and have low scores on the mental health identity and/or alienation scales. In addition, there is a strong association between mental health categorization, identification, and alienation and the expressed desire for increased healthcare, education, and welfare spending. Finally, I find that the political predictors and political consequences for the emerging mental health identity differ from those for physical disability and serious physical illness categorization and identification. These findings have far-reaching consequences for mental health advocacy and the role mental health identity will play in the political sphere—especially as Gen Z matures as a cohort.