Wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Political assassinations. Executive orders. Supreme Court decisions. Egg prices. Climate change. While negative and polarizing headlines are nothing new, the places where they reach people have diversified. They can feel almost impossible to avoid.
MinnPost talked with mental health professionals about the changing media landscape, its impact on well-being and how people can cope.
People who struggle with mental illness may experience a worsening of symptoms as a result of news consumption, said Byron Almen, a Twin Cities therapist. Typically, Almen said, “it’ll hit them in the areas where they’re already vulnerable.”
Past trauma unrelated to current events can actually resurface, Almen said. Take, for example, trauma related to an abusive or overbearing parent; if someone perceives the government as overbearing, the feelings associated with that parent can become associated with the government.
“There’s a kind of echo effect that happens. So what was very intimate and painful becomes global and painful at the same time,” Almen said.
For Rebecca Arens, a mental health advocate who has experienced mental health struggles, the influx of negative news on TV can worsen her depression. “I would have to sleep away the pain,” she said. She stopped paying attention to news on social media, though it still appears.
Whenever Arens eats in the cafeteria where she lives, she is faced with TVs displaying the latest headlines.
“Social Media — I have a choice to turn that on on my device. A TV in a community setting like I’m in? I don’t have a choice,” she said. She can turn her back and put on headphones, she said, but the choice impacts her ability to socialize, another factor affecting her happiness.
Arens wishes news outlets would spend more time highlighting positive events, like the people who came from all over the world to clean up the devastation in Texas after recent flooding. She thinks part of the issue lies with new reporters and the angles they choose. “Why do you focus on the negative?” she said. “This affects not just people with mental illnesses. This affects everybody, doesn’t it?”
Dealing with change
Some of the recent polarizing news stems from the transition between presidential administrations. Increasing division in Congress makes for legislative inefficiency, prompting incumbent presidents to sign executive orders to enact policy quickly.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt is known to have signed the most executive orders out of all U.S. presidents. Earlier this year, President Donald Trump, having signed 142 orders, broke Roosevelt’s record for most executive orders signed in the first 100 days of a presidency.
As of July 7, President Trump had signed 170 executive orders. Pair these executive orders with the back-and-forth between the executive branch and the federal courts and the recent signing of the GOP-led One Big Beautiful Bill Act and you have quite a few Americans experiencing major changes in their lives and, thus, feeling that they need to pay more attention to the headlines on their screens.
Sue Aberholden, the executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) Minnesota, has fielded several emails from people worried about losing their Medicaid benefits under the new legislation. Most of the people will keep their benefits since they have serious mental illnesses and are certified as disabled, she said. But they’re not receiving in-depth information.
“The news usually gives you snippets. They don’t provide that detail, and I think that can make it hard for people whose very lives depend on Section 8 Housing, on Medicaid, on SNAP,” she said.
At NAMI, support groups normally don’t discuss politics, especially during elections, but the stream of changes in the country makes avoiding the subject more difficult.
“We don’t talk about candidates. You know, we just don’t go there. But now we’re seeing all these policies that are impacting people, and they’re like, I have to talk about it,” Aberholden said.
She said the news landscape she experienced growing up has shifted dramatically. “You had the newspapers and you had the 6 and 10 o’clock news,” she said. “There was nothing else, and so your exposure to what was happening in the world in some way was limited.”
Aberholden thinks a lot of people’s fatigue and anxiety surrounding the news started with COVID-19 and the constant reminder that people were dying worldwide. News outlets like CNN displayed infection and death counts around the clock.
“If you’re already struggling with your mental health – maybe you have depression or anxiety, schizophrenia, maybe you’re feeling a little paranoid about the world, right? I mean, it just makes it worse,” she said.
Although distressing news is inevitable, people receive it more regularly because of social media. The experience of immigration, for instance, is no longer limited to immigrants, advocates, law enforcement or those involved in policy. Through livestreams and videos of immigration raids and protests, GoFundMe campaigns for legal fees and tweets from public officials, anyone can observe processes associated with immigration and enforcement as they happen.
Social media has opened the door to more frequent sharing of news, not just for journalists but also for everyday citizens, increasing the potential for misinformation to spread. Tweets rehashing breaking news headlines go viral and people react to them without knowing if they hold accurate information.
How to cope
An October 2021 study published in the Journal of Public Health reported that misinformation related to COVID-19 increased symptoms of panic, anxiety and other forms of psychological distress. A 2023 study of people’s news habits found a link between “severely problematic news consumption” and poor mental health.
What should people do when the headlines are endless and have the potential to cause harm?
Unplugging is an option, but as Arens has explained, it isn’t always feasible and can come at the cost of community. Some people constantly monitor the news because they feel their communities are unsafe or that they have to do the work to make them safer. Others worry about how much money they should have in their savings should the economy weaken. Are protests turning into riots? Is World War III imminent? Do they need to pack a go-bag?
Arens’s understanding of community and how it can fuel her happiness comes from her Christian faith and an online class she audited at Harvard. She realized that trying to handle the emotions herself will only make things worse. “It will only lead you down a path of losing yourself — losing yourself and losing that connection with other people. You have to talk about how you feel,” she said.
She volunteers with NAMI and is a part of its legislative committee that advocates for policy changes that would combat the mistreatment of people with mental health conditions and mental health stigma.
NAMI’s Aberholden recommends limiting time spent checking the headlines, knowing that people’s mental health suffers when they’re on edge. “Maybe checking every two hours or something like that,” she said, “but not to have that constant because it just keeps our nervous system way too excited.”
Some people might find it best to focus on what’s in front of them. Aberholden said that cleaning and baking are commonly used as therapeutic techniques when things feel out of control. What is dirty becomes clean and what is separate becomes whole. “People do things so that they can see a product quickly, instead of when you’re trying to change the world. You know, it doesn’t happen overnight,” she said.
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(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
