ArticlePloS one
Politics is making us sick: The negative impact of political engagement on public health during the Trump administration.
Article in PloS one. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed, 51 citations in OpenAlex.
- The impact of political climate on student health and wellbeing: a qualitative study.BMC public health · 2026Article
- A Nation Veering off Course: Implications for Efficacy and Well-Being.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Cognitive distortions are associated with increasing political polarization.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Potential Global Effects of the Rise of the Far Right on Public Health.American journal of public health · 2025Review
- Political Polarization and Wellbeing: Investigating Potential Intrapersonal Harm From Affective Polarization.International review of social psychology · 2025Article
- Article
- Anxiety, depression, headaches - is political polarization bad for your health?Nature medicine · 2024Article
- Putting the affect into affective polarisation.Cognition & emotion · 2024Review
- Adolescents' political and personal responses to recent policies restricting abortion and gender-affirming care.Contraception: X · 2024Article
- Impact of Residential Area Characteristics and Political Group Participation on Depression Among Middle-Aged and Older Adults: Results of an 11-Year Longitudinal Study.Innovation in aging · 2024Article
- The Relationship Between Corruption Perception and Depression: A Multiple Mediation Model.Psychology research and behavior management · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
objectivesTo quantify the effect of politics on the physical, psychological, and social health of American adults during the four-year span of the Trump administration.
methodsA previously validated politics and health scale was used to compare health markers in nationally representative surveys administered to separate samples in March 2017 (N = 800) and October 2020 (N = 700). Participants in the 2020 survey were re-sampled approximately two weeks after the 2020 election and health markers were compared to their pre-election baselines.
resultsLarge numbers of Americans reported politics takes a significant toll on a range of health markers-everything from stress, loss of sleep, or suicidal thoughts to an inability to stop thinking about politics and making intemperate social media posts. The proportion of Americans reporting these effects stayed stable or slightly increased between the spring of 2017 and the fall of 2020 prior to the presidential election. Deterioration in measures of physical health became detectably worse in the wake of the 2020 election. Those who were young, politically interested, politically engaged, or on the political left were more likely to report negative effects.
conclusionsPolitics is a pervasive and largely unavoidable source of chronic stress that exacted significant health costs for large numbers of American adults between 2017 and 2020. The 2020 election did little to alleviate those effects and quite likely exacerbated them.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.