OBJECTIVE: Many therapists and counselors are not well informed about how political stress affects clients' lives, especially in its nonviolent forms. Capitalizing on Israel's ongoing judicial reform/overhaul, we compared the effects of this political stressor on depression and anxiety with those of childhood and adult stress. METHOD: = 1,202) was recruited in August 2023, at the peak of the judicial reform/overhaul, via an online platform. Participants indicated their support (28%), opposition (52%), or deliberation about ("don't-knowers"; 20%) the reform/overhaul and completed measures of depression/anxiety, negative and positive affect, and childhood and adult stressful events. Structural equation modeling and logistic regression analyses were conducted to predict continuous and discrete levels of the outcomes. RESULTS: Opposition contributed 5.5%, 2%, 1.3%, 2.2%, and 2% to the variance of continuous negative and positive affect, depression, and anxiety and was associated with 61% and 104% increased risk for binary (flagged) depression and anxiety compared with support. Deliberation contributed 1.4%, .5%, .9%, 1.7%, and 1.5% to these continuous outcomes and was associated with 59% and 107% increased risk for flagged depression and anxiety. Deliberation, but not opposition, predicted an increased risk for flagged anxious depression. Except for many adult stressful life events, the effect of political stress on depression and anxiety was stronger than, or comparable to, the effects of childhood and adult stress. CONCLUSIONS: Political stress, even in its nonviolent form, is a clinical risk factor that should be addressed by therapists and counselors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
Shahar et al. (Mon,) studied this question.