The N.Y.C. Mayoral Election, as Processed in Therapy
“Politics comes up every day in my practice,” said Jonathan Alpert, a psychotherapist in New York and Washington, DC. “For some, it’s Mamdani or Cuomo. For many, it’s Trump. I’ve seen people start sessions with a sort of ritual rant, denouncing the latest headline before we’ve even started.” Every therapist I spoke with mentioned their patients’ tendency to scroll and bring up specific articles and social media posts that agitated them. (One therapist said some of her patients obsessed over YouTube videos from Mamdani’s early rap career, finding them “very upsetting.” “They’ll say, ‘Have you heard of that? Have you seen that? That rap video where he says he’s aligned with Hamas?’)
Naturally, these concerns peak around election time. Jessica January Behr, a licensed psychologist and founder and principal of Behr Psychology, a practice on the Upper West Side, said that most of the time her work is exciting or, at the very least, unpredictable. “You never know what people are going to come and talk about,” she said. “Every hour is totally different.” But then an election takes place. “It’s a tough work week for us,” she said. “It’s like, ‘Oh, my God, I’m about to go through four eight-hour days where everyone is talking about the election.’ “After the election, it is also common for patients to make additional appointments, showing up twice in one week,” Schreyer-Hoffman said.
Part of what’s exhausting about these political discussions is that they are mostly one-sided, much like the nature of therapy. “It’s not much of a conversation, is it?” » said Behr. “You are in a different position as a therapist. The result, she says, is a “whiplash of projections,” with patients often assuming that their therapists completely agree with them. Many patients have even begun to seek out therapists with a certain worldview. A recent reference example, from a therapist Listserv: “Ideally, the therapist is Palestinian, but someone aligned with anti-Zionist values could also be suitable. Another person, searching for a therapist on behalf of their friend, wrote, “They only want to work with someone who identifies as Republican and is willing to talk about it.” (The person added that it was OK for the therapist to be out of network.)
Most therapists I spoke with said they strive to maintain neutrality, even when they strongly disagree with what their clients are saying. Alpert takes a different approach: “I always push back,” he told me. “My job is not to agree with patients, but to show them a mirror. He added: “Therapy, when done well, should be one of the few places where people can safely confront their disagreements.” »
Over the summer, a patient walked into Alpert’s Manhattan office after witnessing an assault outside her apartment. “This is why we need Mamdani,” she told Alpert, who later wrote an opinion piece for the newspaper. Wall Street Journal how wrong his thinking was. He argued that Mamdani’s public safety plan, which involves reducing the role of police and hiring more social workers, would actually contribute to the kind of urban decline his patient was concerned about. (Schreyer-Hoffman said crime has also become a frequent topic of her sessions: “A lot of our patients have had something happen on the street,” she said. “A lot of them don’t feel safe — active subway users, who walk around a lot, who have seen the homeless population explode.”)
In his article, Alpert compared Mamdani to a bad therapist, one who offers people comfort rather than real solutions. (This despite the fact that Mamdani’s main appeal is his solutions-oriented approach: freezing rents, making buses free, providing universal child care.) Alpert said he has seen people across the political spectrum consumed with rage in recent years. “Some of them border on homicide,” he said. “I’ve had patients in their 20s and 60s who openly wanted Trump dead.” Alpert, who has appeared as a commentator on Fox News, says he has lost patients for pushing back during sessions. “Some people don’t want therapy,” he told me. “They want affirmation of their politics.” Along the same lines, patients sometimes seek to validate their individual choices: “They ask: ‘Should I vote for Mamdani even if his policies scare me?’ or “Would voting for Sliwa make me a bad person?” What they’re really asking is, “Can you reassure me that my anxiety means I’m morally right?” »
