Stressful Politics? Understanding Politics as a Stress Factor for Mental Health Problems

To date, most research on mental health and politics has focused on how mental health affects political engagement. This project takes the opposite approach.

Research on politics as a contributing factor to mental health problems has mostly emphasised the effect of election outcomes on emotional and subjective wellbeing.

Tackling UCL’s Grand Challenge of Mental Health and Wellbeing theme on ‘Social changes and their mechanisms’, the project seeks to answer two main questions:
1)    How does politics as a source of stress, compared to other non-political stressors, affect citizens’ mental health and well-being?
2)    What factors influence individual differences in the impact of politics-based stressors on mental health?

Surveying young adults in the weeks immediately following the UK General Election (2024) to rapidly collect data on a large sample of first-time voters, the project aims to:
1.    improve the measurement of political stressors
2.    utilise validated scales of mental health problems and well-being
3.    explore differential effects among different groups
4.    understand what kind of psychological strategies can help reduce the mental health impacts of political stressors. 

Cognitive measurements will be embedded in the survey to yield mechanistic insights into any observed relationships. In a follow-up wave approximately six months later,  the longer-term effects of GE2024 on respondents’ mental health will be studied to assess whether short-term changes in mood are related to longer-term psychopathology. In addition to the large two-wave survey, a third component of the study will use daily diary methods to track political efficacy and trust as well as mental health in a smaller number of respondents, one week before and after GE2024.