Maintaining Your Mental Health Under Threat of Autocracy

A survival guide in the wake of the election and what lies ahead.

I recently saw someone on social media pleading for less analysis from experts about why the outcome of the 2024 US election happened and more advice about how to cope with the threat of autocracy going forward. While helpful recommendations are already being published about what can be done politically [1] — Tim Synder’s admonition not to “obey in advance” is a good start [2] — this piece focuses on how to maintain our mental health when authoritarian regimes come into power.

Unplug from Toxicity

A week ago, I was telling myself that it was important to stay on X to counter the misinformation and increasingly toxic environment of the site. Now I’m less convinced.

Even when X was Twitter, it’s business model was rooted in promoting engagement by stoking the flames of conflict, provoking outrage, and profiting from ideological and political polarization. Things have gotten worse since Elon Musk took the helm to push back against what he saw as liberal bias that was infringing free speech and greenlighting disinformation and hate speech in the process. Recent evidence has now revealed that over the past several months, X’s algorithms have been promoting right-wing accounts and pro-Trump messaging, drowning out liberal voices [3,4,5].

While it’s a good idea to keep tabs on what people are thinking — especially those who disagree with us — it’s not such a good idea to support forums that promote propaganda and it’s not mentally healthy to get lost in doomscrolling or exposing yourself to hate. Just so, people have been leaving X in droves in the past few weeks, whereas sites like Bluesky have gained millions of new users (you can find me there).

Stay Informed

Although Musk has recently supported the idea that “the media is the people” (a claim coined during the 2011 pro-democratic Arab Spring movement [6]), X’s biased algorithms prove just how wrong-headed that concept can be.

In keeping ourselved informed about what’s going on the world, we should take care to seek the truth, not merely what confirmation bias and motivated reasoning allow us to believe to be true. Although the kind of populist movements that often pave a path to autocracy hinge on the premise that experts and expertise shouldn’t be trusted, getting reliable news requires objective news reporting. In recent decades, opinionated hot-takes, click-bait headlines, and objective reporting have been intermixed and conflated, but the latter is still out there.

Spend the time to find, read, and subscribe to good journalists and quality journalism. Study the history of authoritarianism and the fall of democracy around the globe (e.g., Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracies Fail, Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s Strongmen, Tim Synder’s On Tyranny, Anne Applebaum’s Twlight of Democracy, Jason Stanley’s How Facism Works, and Hannah Arendt’s classic, The Origins of Totalitarianism).

At the same time, don’t shelter yourself from dissenting opinions. As I advised on my Psychology Today blog back in 2016, limit your use of social media, consider paying for something better, and make a conscious effort to learn outside your echo chamber.

Seek Refuge and Build Coalitions

With liberalism being dealt a hard blow in this year’s election, liberals now find themselves in an uncomfortable minority, just as they did in 2016. It’s time once again to circle the wagons, but to also self-assess, reorganize, and restrategize.

This time however, it’s going to be necessary to find common ground and form coalitions with those who might have been unlikely bedfellows in the past. There are plenty of people out there who might still disagree on certain issues, but above all else value democracy over the oppression of autocracy.

There’s no better way to find such allies than in person. Spend less time anonymously in front of a computer or cellphone, get out of the house, and interact — not argue — with people face-to-face. Resist the temptation to avoid respectfully discussing differences of opinion.

Refuse to be Surprised, But Don’t Normalize

While unrelenting pessimism can be depressing, it can also shield us from disappointment. And unwarranted optimism, when it causes us to lower our guard, can be dangerous.

Believe that autocrats will do what they say they’re going to do and don’t allow yourself to write it off as hyperbole or convince yourself that it can’t happen here. Filling cabinet positions and the courts with loyalists, purging the country with mass deportations, and prosecuting political enemies is exactly what autocrats do. They’ve been doing it across the world throughout time. It can absolutely happen here in the US.

After World War II, the German pastor Martin Niemöller had this to say after the rise and fall of the Third Reich:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me [7].

Refusing to be surprised and expecting the worst while not allowing ourselves to normalize the outrageous can help us to steel ourselves against kind of complacency that Niemöller could only regret in hindsight.

Look Forward, Not Backward

If we do nothing, coping by turning a blind eye or just hoping that “this too shall pass,” we should expect that nothing will change and we can only blame ourselves when things get worse. Passivity and denial — whether abstaining from voting because we think there are “no good candidates” or deciding not to speak up when one is a witness to injustice — gets us nowhere.

So allow yourself the time and space to mourn, but avoid complaining and pointing fingers of blame. Focus instead on what you can do now and in the future.

As I wrote in 2022 at the start of the war in Ukraine, “while there’s no denying that avoidance can be protective in the short-term, activism is often a better way to help us feel in control than just exposing ourselves to trauma over and over again.”

So, support or join national, state, and local organizations that are fighting for democracy and to protect individual rights. Get involved in grass-roots politics and if you’re disenchanted with or dismissive of the politicians that are supposed to be representing you, consider stepping up and running for political office yourself.

The last breath of democracy is often spent on voting autocrats into power. The only way to restore democracy is to make sure we don’t let them continue unopposed.

References

1. Cadwalladr C. How to survive the broliarchy: 20 lessons from the post-truth world. The Observer; November 17, 2024.
2. Synder T. On tyranny: Twenty lessons from the twentieth century. New York: Crown, 2017.
3. Dewey C. Elon Musk’s X may be giving right-wing content the upper hand. Vanity Fair; October 30, 2024.
4. Singh K, Dang S. Musk and X are epicenter of US election misinformation, experts say. Reuters; November 4, 2024.
5. Graham T, Andrejevic M. A computational analysis of potential algorithmic bias on platorm X during the 2024 US election. Unpublished working paper (preprint).
6. Rai J. Information is a revolution if handled with tact: Internet stalwarts. India Today Enclave, March 19, 2011.
7. Martin Niemöller. “First they came for…” Holocaust Museum. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/martin-niemoeller-first-they-came-for-the-socialists