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Gordon Street is a clinical psychologist who lives and works in Lincoln. He also serves as chair of the Lincoln Lakes Regional Democratic Committee and vice chair of the Penobscot County Democratic Committee.
I see sick people. They are depressed and anxious (some panicked) because of what the Trump administration has been doing.
I am a clinical psychologist — a form of mental health counselor — so day after day, I see the Trump administration’s negative impact on mental health, and not only in my patients but also my friends. That includes some who voted for Donald Trump but are now saying what he is doing now is not what we elected him for.
One person asked me to write about this because recent stock market losses have wiped out so much of her retirement income, making her anxious and depressed and interfering with her sleep. When I went online recently to check my own retirement accounts, I discovered I now show an unrealized loss of more than $22,000 — pocket change to Trump and his buddy, Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, but not to me.
Maybe I won’t sleep well either. But at least I am not retired yet. I have time for my stock prices to recover, if the markets bounce back soon enough. If they don’t continue to tank.
Research suggests medical doctors and hospitals as well as police and other emergency responders are also seeing the impacts. Significant drops in the stock market have been associated with not only increased use of anti-depressants and mental health counseling but also increases in hospital admissions for medical problems (such as aggravated peptic ulcers and abdominal pain), increases in domestic violence (especially on weekends after downturns), and increases in suicide rates both immediately (within days of a significant downturn) and still detectable in the following year. Why? Because research also finds people respond much stronger to negative stresses such as financial downturns than to positives, with many people not bouncing back psychologically even in those circumstances when the stock market has recovered days later.
Donald Trump is not a scientist, but he is running a huge experiment, and we are all his lab rats. It appears he is trying to prove that tariffs can improve the economy in the long run, despite evidence from at least two historic impositions of tariffs that proved disastrous, including the Smoot-Hawley Tariff in 1930 which is considered one of “the most catastrophic acts in congressional history” for deepening the Great Depression.
If Trump really was a scientist, he would have had to get approval for his research through an institutional review board (IRB). He would have had to demonstrate that his experiment was both likely to work and would not harm its subjects — or that the harm would be minimal and/or quickly recoverable. An IRB would have rejected him on both counts.
Trump is not a scientist. He is a president, and the U.S. Supreme Court has granted him broad immunity for official acts. There is so much to fix here, it is hard to know where to start.
So far Congress is not really standing up to him, but that seems to be our best bet. So, call, write or email your U.S. senator or representative. Tell them your story, how what the Trump administration is doing is hurting you personally. Motivate them to act. Don’t wait until the next elections to vote for change because that might be too late.
