It was impossible to avoid. For the past two months, everything has revolved around the election. Trashy ads on TV screamed about Kamala Harris supporting transgender prisoners receiving transition-related care and Trump taking away abortion rights and taxing the middle and lower classes into permanent generational paralysis. Local and state-level politicians across the country mercilessly attacked each other in ads, hurling accusations of lies and criminal behavior. It all felt like a Jerry Springer fever dream. The political stress has reached such an apex that many people are turning to psychedelic interventions for relief.
“We’ve had an uptick in calls, people making appointments, and even new people trying to connect with us,” says Dr. Cheryl Malina, a board-certified Emergency Medicine physician and co-founder of Keta Medical Center, a network of ketamine-assisted therapy clinics, in New York City and New Jersey. “I didn’t connect it with the election until recently when I started to ask patients if the election was affecting them. Overwhelmingly, people had very strong responses.”
Malina tells DoubleBlind that the uptick in booked appointments amounted to an 18.6 percent rise across all Keta Medical Center locations. The surge led them to extend their weekday business hours and add more availability on weekends at other locations.
“We’re always open in the evenings to accommodate people’s work schedules, but because of all the calls and appointments we’ve been getting, we started opening up earlier in the day in most locations and extending weekend hours,” Malina says. “One patient I saw recently specifically made an appointment for the day after the election. We adjusted our schedule to make sure we got him in right after Election Day.”
READ: The Psychedelics Movement Must Shift Toward Radical Empathy and Collective Healing
While the anxiety surrounding this election felt — and still feels — at an all-time high, political stress is nothing new. Political groups pay advertisers to stir up public anxiety and tension in the lead-up to elections.
“It’s very conscious, it’s very calculated,” says Anil Menon, UC Merced political science professor, according to the UC Merced newsroom. He says that triggering big emotions is a tactic used to impact the outcome of elections.
The American Psychological Association’s latest “Stress in America” survey states that political stress is among the biggest sources of chronic anxiety in the US. “More than 7 in 10 (77 percent) adults reported the future of our nation as a significant source of stress in their lives, making it the most common source of significant stress in this year’s survey,” the report says. “The 2024 US presidential election followed at 69 percent” as another leading source of stress.
Political strain in 2024 saw a slight uptick from 2020, rising from 68 percent to 69 percent, according to the survey. But both figures represent a significant jump from 2016 when only 52 percent of people reported feeling election-related anxiety. These numbers indicate that election stress — more specifically, political angst — is becoming the norm, not the exception.
Wilhelmina De Castro, LCSW, founder of Integrate — a California clinical therapy practice offering various therapeutic approaches, including ketamine-assisted therapy — says she has also noticed a general uptick in people seeking therapy at the moment.
“For the folks I work with who are familiar with the benefits of ketamine, many of them are leveraging it as a tool to help them manage the high stress and anxiety or the trauma activations caused by the political climate,” she tells DoubleBlind in a phone interview. “Many of them have utilized [ketamine] in the months leading up to now to help support their mental health, too.”
While political stress underpins much of De Castro’s current support, she explains to DoubleBlind that a recurring theme is how difficult emotions triggered by the political climate are straining relationships.
“Stress becomes activated when the topic of conversation is ‘what are you putting down on the ballot’ or ‘what are you voting for,’ and it becomes a conversation around shared values, which impacts friendships and intimate relationships,” she says. “I think it is amplified in this particular election because the political has become personal, especially because of the violent rhetoric and actual violence toward certain groups of marginalized folks.”
The November 5 election also occurred at a sensitive time of the year: just 23 days before Thanksgiving, which marks the start of the holiday season. De Castro says that more people make therapy appointments — both traditional and psychedelic — this time of year, as it’s notoriously challenging.
READ: At-Home Ketamine Treatments Are an Effective Way to Treat Anxiety and Depression
Lauren Taus, a licensed psychotherapist practicing ketamine-assisted therapy in Southern California, echoed De Castro’s observation about the holiday season coinciding with increased appointments.
“It’s November. Almost every year at this time, there is an uptick in appointments because people are bracing for the holidays,” Taus tells DoubleBlind. “But throw an election in there, and people are extra frazzled.”
Working 15 years in the field, Taus notes that while therapy appointments have increased and most of her clients are bringing up election stress and difficult family dynamics, this trend isn’t new. The 2016 election was similar.
“People are expressing many of the same feelings they felt in 2016. But, now, I have a number of clients who are in their 20s and participating in this for the first time and really feeling more than they did when they were younger.”
While many psychedelic therapy providers — including a host of underground psilocybin mushroom facilitators who did not want to be named in this story — have seen more appointments on their books, Ketamine Clinics Los Angeles hasn’t seen the surge other practices have.
“We are not busier than usual,” says Sam Mandel, co-founder and CEO of Ketamine Clinics LA, noting that they are almost always booked. “But when I asked my team if people had been saying anything about the election, they told me that people mentioned coming in because they were really stressed out and anxious about the election.”
READ: How Psychedelic Therapy Can Help Us Thrive Beyond Systems of Oppression
Mandel says that one client specifically wanted to wait to receive treatment until after the election. “They didn’t elaborate in a lot of detail, but I’m assuming they didn’t want to be in an altered state of mind, or they didn’t want to be preoccupied with thinking about the impending [election] results during their session.”
Political stress is difficult to properly assess because it is nuanced and multifaceted. But, early studies suggest that people who report feeling anxious about politics aren’t necessarily people who experience consistently high levels of anxiety or other psychological conditions.
“There’s something distinctive about the way politics is stressing us out,” Jayme Renfro, PhD, told the American Psychological Association (APA). Renfro is an associate professor of political science at the University of Northern Iowa who has conducted research on election stress. “Political anxiety is a thing that is separate from, or at least a distinct part of, stress and anxiety in general.”
The APA says one reason it’s complicated to understand is that it shows up differently for everyone. Political events can trigger a wide variety of emotions, from worry, sadness, and despair to outrage, disgust, anger, and frustration, to name just a few. They can also carry both immediate and lasting consequences, often sparking conflicts between groups that lead to tangible social impacts.
De Castro notes that such stress can harden emotional and neural pathways as a trauma response. She also tells DoubleBlind that many of her clients are still working through the trauma from previous elections.
The Western world struggles with confronting and moving through heavy emotions like grief, fear, and shame — all of which are being felt by many Americans post-election. Psychedelics may offer a path to navigating the frustrations of now while maintaining compassion. “Medicine journeys can be a way for us not to be hardened by all of this,” De Castro says, “and still stay tender with one another and tender as a community as we harness our collective power.”
*This story was edited to clarify Wilhelmina De Castro’s quotes about violence and rhetoric, and collective power.
