Trump’s win left clinically significant trauma in 1 in 4 college students, study says

Many supporters of Hillary Clinton’s bid for the White House woke up the day after the 2016 presidential election a bit stressed out.

But a new study finds that, for a large percentage of young adults, that stress in the months after the election was so intense it rose to the level of a “clinically significant” trauma.

“What we were interested in seeing was, did the election for some people constitute a traumatic experience,” Melissa Hagan, an assistant professor of psychology at San Francisco State University and lead author of the research, said in a statement. “And we found that it did for 25 percent of young adults.”

In January and February of 2017, Arizona State University students who were enrolled in psychology classes were asked how they felt about the election outcome, using what’s called an “Impact of Event Scale.”

“The scale is used to gauge the extent to which individuals have been impacted by an event in such a way that it might lead to diagnosable post-traumatic stress disorder,” Hagan said in a statement.

Researchers said they chose their time frame to avoid capturing students’ finals-related stress at the end of a semester, and to avoid raw emotional responses students might have had closer to election day.

The researchers also gathered demographic data on each of the 769 students who participated — including age, race, ethnic background, political affiliation and class, researchers said.

The results? One in four students’ symptoms related to the election met the criteria for “clinically significant” levels of stress — and the average level of stress students were experiencing was roughly that experienced by mass shooting survivors seven months after the shooting, a San Francisco State University news release on the research said.

The study, published Monday in the Journal of American College Health, also said that race and social class were less useful at predicting the election-related stress than a handful of other demographic data points, including political party, sex and religion.

Of the students surveyed, 18.5 percent said they were “completely satisfied” with the election’s outcome, while 37.2 percent were “completely dissatisfied. The rest fell somewhere in the middle, with 25 percent “somewhat satisfied” and 19.2 percent “somewhat dissatisfied.”

The election outcome left 39 percent of students “considerably” or “extremely” upset, researchers found.

Of the 769 college students in the study, 253 identified as Democrats, 276 as Republicans and 235 as something else, while 449 were white and 320 were non-white, the study said. The study found black and non-white Hispanic students reported more election-related impacts than white students, as did female students versus their male classmates.

Students who did not identify as Christian also reported being more highly impacted — psychologically — by the election result, researchers said.

Researchers said one of the strengths of the study was its large and relatively diverse sample.

The study concluded that “the high level of event-related distress is concerning because elevated symptoms of event-related stress are predictive of future distress and subsequent PTSD diagnoses.”

This story was originally published October 22, 2018 at 12:59 PM with the headline "Trump’s win left clinically significant trauma in 1 in 4 college students, study says."