If you're a regular DWT reader, you probably wonder, at least some of the time, how prevelent is mental illness among Trump supporters. Most people think rabid Trumpists are just stupid, but there is a big difference between mental illness and low IQs. Yesterday, USA Today published a report by Kelly Tyko about the Arizona woman, Melissa Rein Lively, who, earlier this month filmed herself tearing down a mask display at a Target in Scottsdale. She spent a week in a mental-health facility after the incident, and is using the public meltdown as a warning to others to seek help for issues related to mental health, especially during the coronavirus pandemic. She said what happened to her "was scary and it changed my life forever. I felt I had absolutely no control over my actions."Nicknamed "Q-Anon Karen," Lively, who was arrested at her home after the incident, claimed she worked for the Trump regime. Her husband filed for divorce and she also lost all the clients she had at her public relations firm, the Brand Consortium Public Relations. Lively told Tyko that extreme stress from the pandemic triggered what she called a "manic bipolar episode... I can absolutely see that how I acted was unbelievably inappropriate not to mention classless and just completely out of character for how I conduct myself, professionally and personally."
Though police spoke to her at Target and let her go, when she got home, she said, her husband called police out of concern about her mental state. She livestreamed the exchange on Instagram. It was in that video that she told officers she had connections at the White House, asked officers to call President Trump and said she was a spokesperson for Q-Anon.Q-Anon Karen"Everything that I was kind of doing was facetious and sarcastic and I realize now the world, obviously, took everything I was saying seriously like I really believed that," she told USA Today. "I was not arrested, I was taken in for a mental health evaluation. That was something that like really opened my eyes to this whole process."
Her husband, Jared Lively, said he feared it was an escalation of a days-long decline in his wife’s mental health and a continuation of a problem that he said had manifested itself the year before. The Republican Party has the exact same problem. In fact, the party is now running almost a dozen Q-Anon candidates for Congress, at least some of whom are in districts red enough to guarantee that there will be Q-Anon believers in Congress next year, part of a dwindling and increasingly irrelevant Republican congressional minority.And then this happened today tooAlthough they don't all act out the way Lively did, the stress we're all going through, is especially hard to deal with for someone who supports Trump, since Trump supporters are likely to be angry, paranoid, self-centered and self-righteous (as well as stupid). A psychologist friend of mine wrote today that "Here he is in front of us, an insane, narcissistic, ignorant, destructive loon who has excelled his whole life at lying, destroying things and cheating people, and a third of the country still worships him. Even though he hates them and hates everyone and is immune to others’ deaths and suffering. Social psychology at its worst... Lively obviously had a lost moment, when she did what she did. Yes, people will be having mental breakdowns. Abuse in the home will be rising drastically out of frustration. There will be many more deaths. Iraqi psychologists talked about the lost generation of mental health in the children exposed to all the horrors there. We will have our very own lost generation, too, of children exposed to horrors at home, captive with no outlets-- school? I suspect many won’t open and of those districts that do, many parents will not send their children. I think we have only seen the tip of the iceberg of destruction so far."Yep... tip of the iceberg for sure. The upheaval is just beginning. Early this morning, the NY Times reported that the economy has been collapsing and that "Economic output fell at its fastest pace on record last spring as the coronavirus pandemic forced businesses across the United States to close their doors and kept millions of Americans shut in their homes for weeks. Gross domestic product-- the broadest measure of goods and services produced-- fell 9.5 percent in the second quarter of the year, the Commerce Department said Thursday. On an annualized basis, the standard way of reporting quarterly economic data, G.D.P. fell at a rate of 32.9 percent... The collapse was unprecedented in its speed and breathtaking in its severity. The only possible comparisons in modern American history came during the Great Depression and the demobilization after World War II, both of which occurred before the advent of modern economic statistics."NPR listeners heard it termed "the sharpest economic contraction in modern American history... The economic shock in April, May and June was roughly four times as sharp as the worst quarterly decline during the Great Recession."And another 1.43 million people filed for unemployment-- just as Trump and Senate Republicans are signaling that they don't want the federal government helping. Anyone think this isn't going to help trigger even more mass psychosis?
