Therapy rooms are often where the zeitgeist is seen most clearly. While other spaces, such as pubs or cafes, allow for casual observations of the human experience, the intimacy of the therapy space allows the expression of the deepest and truest thoughts and experiences humans encounter.
“I just don’t see the point of life of going on this way,” my client, Emily*, told me recently. Emily was not suicidal. In fact, she’d been in relatively good psychological health but had started feeling despairing and hopeless since Trump’s re-election and return to the White House.
President Donald Trump is becoming an increasing topic of conversation among therapists and patients. Credit: Bloomberg
She felt a level of existential despair, she said, a sense that her life plans had been derailed completely and that any hope for a better life for herself, or even a future for humanity, had ended.
Emily is gay, and she watched the repeal of rights for LGBT people in America with horror, dreading the risk of similar incursions in Australia. She was also upset at how others were dismissing her fears.
Many of my more socially aware clients, especially those from disenfranchised identities, have had similar feelings to Emily since January. I have, too. Perhaps paralleled only by the wide-scale despair during COVID-19 lockdowns, though in that scenario, the despair was offset by a desire for things to get better and a belief that things would soon return to “normal”.
This time, the despair feels all-encompassing, marked by feelings of futility, apathy and hopelessness. In many ways, this is unsurprising. Humanity is experiencing a clear poly-crisis with numerous forces cohering to place our collective and individual futures at risk – climate change, fascism, the tech-oligarchy, geopolitical strife, spiralling costs-of-living, the steady repeal of rights and civil liberties – especially for those from marginalised communities.
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Sure, we’ve faced similar circumstances before, but this is the first time we’ve experienced such threats with easy access to technology and the global interconnectedness that renders it likely that what occurs in far-off corners of the world will affect us in some way, even if only economically.
In The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Professionals Assess a President, Dr Jennifer Contarino Panning, an American psychologist, wrote about the increase in anxiety among her clients during Trump’s first term, noting that those historically marginalised were especially strongly impacted, as they had the most to fear from his cruel policies.
