‘Young Left-Wing Women are Far More Mentally Ill than the Much-Maligned Old White Man’

Thus Holger Richter, head of psychiatry at St Mary's Hospital in Dresden, Germany, whose ideas, thankfully printed by the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, merit consideration

I’ve often, and off-handedly so, comment—nay: disparage—what is commonly referred to invariably as ‘woke’, ‘woke-ism’, and, in more general ways, ‘leftism’.

I’m not doing this to point to extremely moronic things I’m observing, but also because in my line of work at a public university in ‘Soviet Norway’ (© The Telegraph; archived), I see a lot of silly things every day: these may range from ultra-‘woke’ nonsense recently (after 2020) imported from the United States to completely absorbed, if not internalised, problematic content spread by equally ‘woke’ colleagues to unsuspecting students (I’m particularly looking at those who, based at departments or faculties of ‘education™’ or ‘pedagogy™’, spread this kind of nonsense to aspiring teachers).

I won’t bore you with a full rant here, but I shall refer you to the ‘bottom lines’.

Every now and then, though, a quantum of sanity breaks through these very cloudy skies, hence I shall give you psychologist Holger Richter, head of the psychiatric ward at St Mary’s Hospital in Dresden (orig. St. Marien-Krankenhaus) and his well-publicised assessment, courtesy of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (in my translation, with emphases and [snark] added).

Mind you, I’m but the messenger here.

---

‘Young Left-Wing Women are Far More Mentally Ill than the Much-Maligned Old White Man’

Psychologist Holger Richter criticises the pathologisation of society. Certain diagnoses have increased by several thousand per cent. A diagnosis gives left-wing people victim status, while right-wingers are more likely to take their lives into their own hands.

By Birgit Schmied, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 6 Feb. 2025 [source; archived]

Mr. Richter, mental illness is on the rise, even though we are doing better and better materially. You blame wokeness. In your book, you write that the ‘emotional right’ has prevailed in psychotherapy. But if a patient is suffering, isn’t that their subjective feeling? [oh, what a moronic opener, isn’t it? Note, first, that material well-being ≠ ‘doing better’; second, correlation ≠ causation (except for the modRNA poison/death juices); and, third, that’s a non-question because if a patient is suffering, that is subjective—which indicates it’s not necessary to afford that person victim status, create a new protected class of people, and shower them with privileges; note that in what follows, all content that’s marked as block quote are the answers by Holger Richter]

My criticism is aimed at certain diagnoses, which are on the rise. People go to a therapist and say: ‘I am highly sensitive’, ‘autistic’, ‘trans’, or ‘have ADHD’. The subjective view is passed off as fact [what a strong reply to that kind of BS he was asked about]. Based on their feelings, patients tick the relevant points in the self-disclosure questionnaire. Wokeness focusses on victim groups and sensitivity. In this way, everyone receives a diagnosis that objectifies their feelings, as well as the therapist’s stamp of approval [so, ‘wokeness’ is therefore the aggregate of individuals mistaking their feelings as facts, and hence a first-rate social contagion]. This also has legal implications.

What do you mean by that?

You can get compensation for disadvantages at your university, you can sue others if you are mislabelled [‘misgendered’], there is money from a victim fund even without legal proof. These diagnoses are susceptible to manipulation. I am by no means accusing all patients of this, but there are some who take advantage of it.

Isn’t it progress if mental illnesses are no longer associated with shame? [another supremely stupid question that presumes something good happens every time we ‘progress’, which is quite a stretch of the imagination to begin with]

Mental illness is losing its stigma. That’s a good thing, but on the other hand it leads to this pathologisation pandemic: certain diagnoses have increased by several thousand per cent. There are currently around 140,000 students studying psychology in Germany, compared to 30,000 in the 1990s. 2,000 new psychotherapy practices are opened in Germany every year. For millennials and Generation Z, psychological suffering is now part of identity formation [full disclosure: born in 1982, I’m technically a millennial, too, and I’m with Holger Richter on this one].

Do you think you identify with your ADHD or hypersensitivity—and feel special as a result?

Today, a diagnosis provides an identity [this is crucial: you get something in addition to what Mr. Richter speaks about in the next sentences]. Traditional identities, on the other hand, play a much smaller role. Nationality, the role as a man or woman, religion or whether you are the child of a professor or a baker. ADHD, gender dysphoria, or autism create new identities [I think he’s onto something here, and I conceive of what Mr. Richter says in the following way: not unlike puberty (when your many childhood playtime roles eventually collapse into your adult self, such a psychological diagnosis (multiple ones are possible) permits a kind of upkeep and/or return to these multiple childhood playtime roles later in life; while role-playing is essential in childhood, children are also not taken completely serious by the law; and while ‘wokies’ also like to throw temper tantrums, these are often done by people 18 years or older who demand special privileges paid by everybody else]

Many adults who are diagnosed with ADHD years later feel a sense of relief: finally their condition has a name. What’s wrong with that?

I don’t deny that a diagnosis can help you to understand yourself. But with some diagnoses, you don’t have to look where it hurts. You don’t have to ask yourself why you keep making the same mistake or why you are so easily offended. There is now a medical cause, a disorder in the brain.

Is that not always the case?

No. Social networks have a major influence with their abundance of stimuli and the toxic offer to constantly compare yourself [note that this is easily spotted since about 2012 when social media apps became available of S.M.A.R.T. devices]. Young girls are particularly affected by this. Added to this is the increased use of drugs and the contagion of an offered identity. One friend says to another: ‘The questionnaire here on the net shows that I have autism.’ So the other does the same. Group identities provide orientation [this works the same with all such ‘imagined’ (Benedict Anderson) and/or ‘invented’ (Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger) group traditions, incl. most notably modern nationalism and political ideologies, by the way].

You say that a diagnosis gives many people victim status. What is the advantage of being a victim?

If you have a diagnosis, you have an explanation as to why you can’t do this or that: I’m hypersensitive or have ADHD, it’s too loud for me, I can’t be exposed to so many stimuli, the open-plan office overwhelms me [claims like these all serve as ‘justification’ for special treatment, and while I’m not denying these conditions exist, not all of them are true (see Mr. Richter’s above consideration, too)]. Some patients have already undergone seven therapies without getting better [well, it may not exactly be the incentive of both therapist and patient to ‘get better’, esp. if (when) the latter’s identity is apparently very attached to this or that diagnosis; as regards the former (therapists), there may also be a powerful incentive to keep going as such a patient is a cash-cow].

Are women more susceptible to social contagion?

It’s mainly young, woke left-wing women who cultivate a kind of victimhood culture and affirm each other in the role of victim. We treat roughly the same number of male and female patients with severe mental illnesses such as schizophrenia or depression, with the same age distribution as in the general population. In the psychotherapy ward and in outpatient psychotherapy, young women between the ages of 18 and 40 clearly predominate—with diagnoses that are often difficult to grasp and expand; sometimes someone receives seven diagnoses [this seems to be the money paragraph here and ask yourself what’s the main difference between men and women in that particular demographic?].

What influence do political beliefs have on mental health? [read carefully, for this is where Ms. Schmied apparently loses her marbles]

This aspect is not discussed enough. People who are convinced that they have control over their lives are better off. You see this in the opposite political spectrum—conservative men are more likely to say: ‘I have to take my life into my own hands, I can’t rely on the state. I have to earn money.’ If they fail, they get up again. Left-orientated people tend to blame the state when they are doing badly, society, the environment, capitalism—and women blame patriarchy [that should be in scare quotes, I surmise]. The attitude prevails: I can’t do anything anyway. They feel powerless and develop symptoms [I’d add one more aspect here, which I believe is crucial: ‘left-oriented people’ do shower blame on all of these named categories, but the manifestation of these are typically—conservative men as described by Mr. Richter; hence left-wing ideologies (cults) may be said to be ultimately based primarily on envy vs. their fellow-men and women, which comes in the form of scapegoating and the derivative desire to—symbolically as well as physically—eliminate the scapegoat by way of what is, technically speaking, a kind of de facto cult-ish offering to placate their envious ‘deity’ (I personally consider left-wing ideologies to be primarily, and ultimately, to be death cults for precisely these reasons].

Do more left-wing women actually come to you for therapy, while right-wing women know how to help themselves? [this is true incredulity at-work, esp. as Ms. Schmied now seeks information that counters what Mr. Richter just said]

Yes, young left-wing women are far more mentally ill than the much-maligned old white man. Diagnosis of a mental disorder offers a way out, a neurotic compromise, if you are convinced that you can’t change anything and yet want to escape society [I’d add that left-wingers seek to do the latter while ignoring the many things one could do in regards to the former, e.g., get up early, dress properly, be on time, etc.; as an aside, I offer all students office hour/supervision at 8:15 a.m., mainly to find out who’s willing to show up (most won’t stop by before 11 a.m.: go figure…)] With their disorders, these patients demand special attention and consideration and often appear very self-confident. They devalue others who question their suffering [this is the envy part, but it’s overwhelmingly projection: ‘oh, honey, you don’t know how it feels to be (insert whatever)…’]. Moderate right-wing and conservative people also see suffering as part of life, but not as an illness [spot-on].

Being able to express your feelings is a positive thing. Many men don’t say when they’re feeling bad. They could come across as unmanly. Wouldn’t it be desirable if young men reflected themselves in the same way without being afraid of being seen as weak? [Ms. Schmied is taking quite some time to reflect on what she’s hearing; the issue, I’d add, isn’t whether young men should think more about themselves—but rather that feelings and thoughts are individual, and by shouting them from the rooftops and demanding special treatment from everybody else, the thin line between the individual and society at-large is crossed]

Absolutely. There is the classic toxic masculinity image: I’m tough, I have no feelings, I’ll get over it. These men are more susceptible to alcohol, they are also more aggressive towards themselves, and they have a higher risk of suicide. But there are also the young, soft, left-wing men who listen to themselves far too much, don’t work, live with their parents and experience every demand from society as an imposition. My advice to them is to learn something from masculinity, to roll up their sleeves, tackle something and thus experience self-efficacy. [also works as general life advice, I’dd add]

Have you already had right-wing extremist men in therapy? [needless to say, Ms. Schmied so dislikes what she just heard that she quickly changes the subject to discuss the bête noire du jour]

Very few. Right-wing extremists often suffer from severe mental illnesses such as depression or paranoia. They are often characterised by pronounced narcissism combined with paranoid personality traits [now, I’d like to propose, by way of a hypothesis, that these conditions may also affect left-wing extremism, which indicates these may be features of extremism per se and not contingent on left/right leanings]. They have a closed mindset and place their own group above all other people [see what I mean?]. They would rather take medication than talk about their feelings. Incidentally, I don’t know any right-wingers with gender dysphoria, i.e., who feel they are in the wrong body [I didn’t mean to note that there aren’t psychological differences between left/right-wing extremists, but that they may be more understandable if one treated the adjective and the noun as different categories—as Mr. Richter explains, once again in light of the foregoing, in the following paragraph].

What is your explanation for this?

Conservative people already have their identity, religion, gender role, family, and home. They are not so open to new experiences and stick to what seems safe to them. They don’t have to accuse anyone of being mislabelled because they are narcissistic in a positive sense. Their narcissism is muted and does not look outside for something else. Perhaps they are also more conformist and repress contradictions and cognitive dissonance [perhaps conservatives do all that, perhaps they don’t (we should over-think everything), but it seems way more sane not to look for a scapegoat].

There is something narcissistic about a society that defines itself by deviating from the norm [this is, by the way, where Ms. Schmied finally catches on]. Can you also identify political types? [Mr. Richter did so literally from the get-go]

Narcissistic personalities tend to fantasise about saving the world. You can see this on the left and green spectrum, but also on the right. There, narcissism manifests itself in fantasies of superiority over other ethnic groups. The vulnerable narcissism is concealed in the patients of diagnosis inflation. They want attention, care, and blame the world via the diagnosis.

Everyone believes they are surrounded by narcissists. But nobody wants to be narcissistic.

It is striking that while ADHD or autism are on the rise, narcissism is rarely diagnosed. In recent years, I have read 8,000 therapy applications as an expert [well, this is where I’m like, I’m wary of trusting any such statement these days]. The diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder has only been made three times. The people who come to me today and say they have autism often have a family, a job, they earn their money—and appear narcissistic. They revolve around themselves and can’t empathise with others. The original autism diagnosis was a severe developmental disorder with intellectual and social impairments [it’s celebrated as ‘neuro-diversity’ these days, by the way, if my LinkedIn feed is any indication].

If narcissism diagnoses are so rarely given: does this mean that therapists confirm what their patients themselves suggest as a diagnosis? [finally, a real question] Or do therapists want to go easy on their patients?

This is an important aspect of the increase in diagnoses. Almost 80% of psychotherapists are now women, and three quarters of their patients are women. In 2000, 60% of therapists were female. Women validate each other more than men do [112% true, which is also why sex-based hiring practices under the misleading label of ‘equality™’ are so corrosive: just consider women in combat units and let your thoughts wander to, say, primary and secondary education (almost totally done by women), politics (mandated quotas that are frequently exceeded, esp. on the left side of the political aisle), or public administration (with universities’ DEI/EDI departments and counselling offices being typically staffed with women); speaking of higher education, while I cherish female colleagues, once a critical mass within any department is reached, by their sheer weight, considerations of ‘let’s all be nice, no discussions or preferences (via, say, good grades) are permissible)]. Women disagree less often, are more empathetic, and more concerned about their [and everyone else’s] well-being. A female therapist may question the patient, who feels victimised, less. Some therapists are also afraid of being seen as misogynistic, racist, or transphobic and prefer to affirm.

That sounds as if women are primarily to blame for the pathologisation of society [Mr. Richter wasn’t passing a value-judgement but rather an observation; Ms. Schmied, by contrast, immediately took this description as a personal offence that she then collectivised: proof-positive, I’d say, of the former’s observation]?

It’s not about guilt, but about social roles and their reflection. We therapists, women and men, have a responsibility to critically reflect on developments and our role in them. Women are at the forefront of the discussions in our clinic. And this is just one factor among many underwriting the trend.

Now there are signs that the woke zeitgeist is ending. The election of Donald Trump, the right-wing nationalist tendencies in many countries. Could the criticism of wokeness lead to mentally ill people being more stigmatised again? [what an insanely stupid question to ask, but then again, every time Mr. Richter puts his finger on something, Ms. Schmied immediately deflects attention to ‘right-wing’ this or that]

I don't think so. It would be desirable if the excesses of pathologisation were increasingly questioned and people took their lives into their own hands. However, we must continue to treat the genuinely mentally ill well and efficiently and offer them as much help as possible to help themselves. That is our task, and we need all our capacities for this [and just like that Mr. Richter calls on us to stop taking those who proclaim that they are ‘highly sensitive’, ‘autistic’, ‘trans’, or ‘have ADHD’—and the ‘woke’—too seriously; I shall add: they may also be mocked relentlessly, too, to make them perhaps even a bit self-aware of their shameful conduct].

So there is no need to fear that the mentally ill will be seen as weak and despicable in contrast to healthy, fit people?

No. But if the attitude that not every human behaviour needs to be pathologised becomes more prevalent again, it can even help. A person does not yet need therapeutic counselling for grief and legal disputes. Social contacts, nature, sport, pleasure, art, and personal goals are just as good therapies [oh, let’s shout this from the roof-tops, shall we?].

---

Holger Richter is the head of the psychology ward at St Marien Hospital in Dresden. His book Jenseits der Diagnosen: Fallstricke der Psychotherapie [translated title: Beyond the Diagnoses: Pitfalls of Psychotherapy] was recently appeared in print by the Stuttgart-based publisher Kohlhammer (2024).

---

Bottom Lines

So, once more, we learn that psychiatry may be highly problematic, to say the least, if not part of the problem we’re facing. I do recommend the book by David Bakan, Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition (New York: Van Nostrand, 1958); note that its author was, back then, Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Missouri, lest you think I’m bringing this up for one or the other more nefarious reason).

Speaking more generally, there is something very, very rotten with the ways and means our societies train physicians and psychologists, too, to say nothing about departments or faculties of education whose cult believers mess with the minds of those who then take care of our children.

This is perhaps best highlighted with an anecdote about one of the recent hires at my department: as I was walking to our Christmas party, I casually chatted with this person (whose sex I won’t identify here), and he or she related growing up in a working-class neighbourhood while his or her parents were firmly middle-class (with university degrees). Expectedly, basically everybody in that neighbourhood voted Socialist, hence this is also what my colleague does to this day—and when I asked why, I received no reply.

When I told my wife this story, she immediately snapped (I’m paraphrasing): you know, that’s because my colleague knew he or she had it better than his or her classmates and neighbours, and there’s a bunch of reasons—to fit it, not to stand out (which is very Scandinavian), and, last but not least, my wife noted: envy plus virtue-signalling.

I merely replied: if you consider the trajectory of 20th-century Socialism™, it’s perfectly logical—even before the failed 1905 coup in Russia, Lenin understood that the masses wouldn’t support a revolution (as Marx had predicted, i.e., Socialism’s first fundamental error). While Lenin revised his essay ‘What is to be done?’ (pub. 1907), Antonio Gramsci in his ‘Audacia e fede’ (22 June 1916) pointed to Socialism as a religion:

Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity. It is a religion in the sense that it, too, is a creed, which has its mystics and its praxis; it is a religion because it has replaced the transcendental God of the Catholics with faith in man and his best energies as the only spiritual reality.

As really existing Socialism degenerated into genocidal mass slaughter, it was nonetheless used by Anglo-American elites to destroy Fascism and National Socialism during WW2. Importing mostly far-left and in part Jewish intellectuals, such as the Frankfurt School (instrumental for the New School in New York), their protagonists subsequently took over US education by the 1960s. One of its leading luminaries, Herbert Marcuse, marks the transition away from Socialism as a mass movement carried forward by the wretched of the earth and argued, in his One-Dimensional Man (first ed. 1964) that the revolution would henceforth be carried out by intellectuals.

Make no mistake, part of the underlying pathology—a term that seems very much adequate here—that ails Western society is precisely the unwillingness of the masses to organically, as Marx fantasised, carry out a social revolution if and when social and political stability, as well as economic opportunities abound.

This thought greatly troubled Lenin and his ilk—we note, in passing, that the best organised Labour party, the German SPD, at their 1906 Mannheim convention, replaced social revolution with participation in ‘bourgeois’ representative democracy—and I shall argue that the elitist vision of how to effect a socialist revolution that is so painfully visible in academia, among experts™ and politicos™ alike, as well as among many business leaders, too, has a long, sordid, and well-traceable trail harking all the way back to Fin de siècle wet dreams by wannabe revolutionaries, such as Lenin, Trotsky, and their ilk.

I’ll mention just one more thing here, which is—extremism emerging ostensibly from the far-right, be it Mussolini’s black shirts or Hitler’s brown shirts, have their conceptual origins in precisely these issues arising from mass society and mass politicking. It’s perhaps no coincidence that all the great slaughters of the first half of the 20th century shared the same cafés and pondered identical intellectual (if you’d like to call it that) questions of how to seize power in the name of the masses but without any limitations on their own personal authority.

Hence, I think that the utterly insane attempts to deflect and distract from the root cause of many of the above-discussed ailments being delusional extremists of all stripes.

If anything, that is my main take-away from Holger Richter’s considerations, and I’m very interested in what your take is, dear readers.

That is, other than the notion that non-extremists—the ‘silent majority’—can, shall, and must resist domination by these extremist whackos irrespective of their leanings.