The morning following Election Day, mere hours after Trump’s win became official, I was sitting in my therapist’s office. Total coincidence. It wasn’t an emergency session or anything. I didn’t need to discuss the mind-blowing events of the past 24 hours or carefully untangle them in my brain. We’d just happened to schedule my next appointment for November 9th. As I sat there, even my counselor seemed a little distant—shell-shocked—admitting that Trump’s win didn’t simply cast a pall over an uneasy nation. His win posed a real threat to women, sexual assault victims and suicidal people who already didn’t feel safe in the world. I could see her mentally ticking through her patients she was now concerned about. That made it real for me. Until then, I’d largely experienced the election through Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. The election didn’t just make people annoyed, fearful or empowered on social media—it carried a real, genuine weight in other people’s lives. In recent days, though, it’s clear that social media is capable of much more than spreading hate, fear and dissent. From Twitter to Facebook to Reddit, users are actively sharing mental health information, tips, tricks, techniques, resources and everything in between to help the people who are still reeling from the election.
These Results Aren’t Worth Drinking Over
Trump’s election has elicited a wide range of personal reactions, ranging from depression to anxiety to genuine fears about the strength of their sobriety. A wonderful feature at Mashable, however, collected tweets that pointed people in the right directions. For those not knowing where to turn, it’s a lantern glowing in the dark. As comprehensive as it is crowd-sourced, the story provided a list of support resources as well as the way many people were sharing, in real time, how they were staying sober. One Twitter user after another was reaching out to their followers, imploring them to not let the election push people back to the bottle or their drug of choice.
“My sober brethren: don’t drink or use over how you feel tonight. Call a friend. Read the BB. Call your sponsor. Live to fight another day” reads one tweet—a sentiment echoed, re-tweeted, shared and “hearted” over and over again online. Instead of despair, real hope was emerging. Another tweet the Mashable feature included: “Just a friendly PSA worth tweeting, if you’re sober and in recovery—don’t drink or use no matter what—even if tonight feels apocalyptic.” Even Rob Delaney, star of Amazon’s hit show Catastrophe, jumped into the fray: “Seen some lovely tweets from sober brothers/sisters about not drinking/using right now. I’m sober & I won’t drink today. Don’t you either.” The Mashable feature then listed all the available AA meetings in the US and UK, as well as Drug Addiction Anonymous meeting locations.
“We Will Be Okay”
For many people, it actually does feel like these are the End of Days. What happened wasn’t the foregone conclusion everyone said would happen. So, it’s no surprise that, according to the Mashable story, “thousands of people spoke about anxiety and panic attacks on Twitter during and after election night.” Many of the tweets highlighted in the article reveal a nation shaken to its core: “I haven’t had a panic attack for three years,” one of many similar posts began. “Today, I break that lucky streak. Thanks a lot, America #ElectionNight.” Others tried hard to remain positive: “I’m off to bed, I know a lot of you have anxiety right now. You are not alone in that. Please try to eat and sleep. We will be okay. Promise.”
Though staying positive may be challenging right now, it is the key to getting through this. “Try to take your mind off things and focus on your breathing and/or surroundings,” Anxiety UK CEO Nicky Lidbetter said in the story. “Try exercising or reading a book; in fact doing anything that requires a level of focus on something other than your own worries will help you to center yourself.” I know I saw others coming to this conclusion online on their own: friends on Instagram taking extra jogs on their treadmills and others essentially throwing up their hands and stepping away from their Facebook accounts for a while. I even have four friends who vowed to quit Facebook altogether and, as of this writing, those accounts are still dark. (I suspect they’ll be back.) One thing I didn’t see, however, was anyone vowing to throw away their hard-fought sobriety. Even in what they perceived as the darkest of days, they weren’t giving that up.
Depressed? You’re Definitely Not Alone
As its worst, social media paints a pretty bleak portrait of where we are, psychologically, as a country. Facebook status updates can spawn miles-long comment threads that read like that bank robbery from the movie Heat, which spilled out into the streets and started hitting innocent bystanders with bullets. By almost any measure, this year’s election brought out the worst in people. Yet no one is alone. Quite the opposite, in fact. According to a Wired story, a psychologist conducted a poll of 1,000 voter-age respondents to probe the emotional impact of the election. Thirty percent of the poll’s respondents were emotionally distressed over Hillary Clinton’s campaign, while 40% reported being similarly upset by Donald Trump’s. “Perhaps most tellingly,” the feature said of the poll, “a whopping 90 percent of those who reported emotional distress felt that the toll of this election was worse than any other election of the past.”
“Seeking help is one of the most important things to do,” Stephen Buckley, from the mental health charity Mind, told Mashable. “Speak to a friend or family member or go to your GP, who can talk you through the support that’s available.” While this election may reveal a country that’s more divided than ever, we’re also still clearly capable of reaching out to help others at their lowest moments. While social media is capable of isolating some of us to the point of simply shutting down, it’s not always the case. In fact, social media empowers us to give complete strangers hope, guidance, support, and the assurance that they’re never alone in their struggles. And if nothing else, while Election Night didn’t yield the result many voters hoped for, it did provide one of the purest, most beautiful examples of people coming together to help others when they needed it the most.
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