A brutal business: The toxicity of politics affects the mental health of world leaders

meIt was a political bombshell, causing a stir and sparking debate in much of Spain. But for film director Pedro Almodvar, the news that Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez was considering resigning last week came as no surprise.

There is no human being who can withstand what the most resilient of our presidents has endured in recent years, Almodvar wrote in an open letter, published days before Snchez announced he would stay, and portrayed Snchez as a politician who had potentially reached his breaking point. .

It was a glimpse into another, often muted, conversation that has been taking place in Spain and around the world in recent years: the impact that the increasingly toxic nature of politics is having on politicians and what can do to relieve it.

When Ashley Weinberg, a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Salford, began collecting data on politicians and their mental wellbeing in the early 1990s, he was one of the few to delve into the subject. A lot of people outside of politics say, Yeah, they don’t deserve any sympathy, Weinberg said. But obviously you want people in all kinds of occupations to be in the best possible frame of mind and state to do their jobs.

In recent years, however, things have begun to change, especially when politicians themselves sound the alarm. They were certainly having that conversation much more often now, Weinberg said. They were listening to politicians saying, there’s only so much time I can do this.

This was the message offered by Ireland’s Leo Varadkar when he announced his resignation as Taoiseach earlier this year, noting: Politicians are human beings and we have our limitations. We give everything until we can’t anymore.

There had been similar sentiment a year before Jacinda Ardern said she no longer had enough in the tank to lead New Zealand as prime minister.

Others, such as the Finnish Sanna Marin, wanted to emphasize that politicians are people. I am human, Marín said in 2022 when he was called to defend his private life, adding that he sometimes longed for joy, light and fun among the dark clouds.

Part of that conversation could be explained by a growing awareness of the importance of mental health, especially in the wake of the Covid pandemic, Weinberg said. There is also a sense that social media and 24-hour news have brought this conversation to the fore as politicians seek to juggle the high workloads and competing interests that have always characterized the job while they and sometimes their relatives are constantly in the public eye.

Politics can be a brutal business, Humza Yousaf, Scotland’s first minister, said this week as she announced her resignation. It takes its toll on your physical and mental health; your family suffers by your side.

In the Netherlands, former deputy prime minister Sigrid Kaag said last year that she had decided to end her political career after years of hatred, intimidation and threats had affected her husband and children. He just couldn’t do that to them again, he said.

It was anecdotes like these that prompted the Berlin-based Apolitical Foundation to launch a first-of-its-kind global survey of politicians’ mental well-being late last year. Interviews and surveys of over 100 current and former politicians found that 41% of current politicians surveyed reported low or very low mental well-being.

What was surprising was how this compared to other professions, said the organization’s Kimberly McArthur. He said this 41% was a lower level of well-being than police, or ambulance and first responders, which are recognized as high-stress positions.

The findings were attributed to a number of factors, including long working hours and the lack of a specific job description or, often, the handover of predecessors. So you step into an incredibly important role, one that has a lot of responsibility but very little clarity, McArthur said.

Social media also plays an important role. It has really changed the game, McArthur said. One of the older interviewees told us that you used to get maybe one letter a week. And then when the email came in, I would get a few emails. But now, for the younger generation, he acknowledged, they were receiving hateful and harassing messages potentially thousands of times a day.

Research has consistently shown that this harassment can be especially severe for women and people of color, McArthur said. Why does someone go from being a normal person to being, once a politician, the object of so much aggression and hatred?

The foundation is working to build on the results by implementing strategies to help improve the well-being of politicians, whether through mindfulness training or challenging rules on social media abuse.

We need political leaders to be at the top of their game, McArthur said, especially when dealing with critical issues like the climate crisis and polarization. We need them to make the best decisions possible because their decisions affect all of our lives in so many ways.

Failure to address these issues could also have serious consequences for political leadership, causing a silencing effect where women, people of color and others avoid work amid concerns about its detrimental impact on well-being, she added. And so you potentially miss out on having really, really good people for that role.

It was an implied risk by Snchez in a letter last week. At this point, the question I legitimately ask myself is: is it all worth it?, he wrote. Honestly, I don’t know.

Now that the conversation is starting to gain steam, Weinberg said the million-dollar question is what needs to be done. And that’s complicated, he said. What’s missing, I guess, is a long, hard look at job design to consider whether this is sustainable or achievable for someone while maintaining good physical and mental health.