Is Woke a Mental Disorder?

Reviewing three studies on people with woke psychology

One of the most successful revolutions in modern American history has occurred without the courtesy of declaring itself. There was no storming of the Winter Palace, no Fourth of July, not even a Juneteenth. It arrived not with a bang, but with a syllabus, and its troops came not uniformed in jackboots but in name tags with preferred pronouns. Yet like all true revolutions, it has swallowed the institutions, hollowed out their purpose, and now wears their skins like trophies.

Think of the subversion of American colleges and universities, the infestation of gender ideology in our high school and even elementary classrooms, and the relentless propagandistic messaging from our media and news outlets. Consider corporations that hold white-privilege workshops and maintain “affinity groups,” federal agencies that hire DEI officers, medical schools that adopt oaths to fight white supremacy rather than the Hippocratic oath to “do no harm,” and therapists encouraged to “decolonize” their practice — and their patients’ minds.

It’s in our schools, movies, newspapers, corporations, government offices, hospitals, and clinics. So I disagree with people who would argue that “woke” has evolved into what

John McWhorter

would call a “zombie word,” one with almost no definitional boundaries, or that it merely indicates “people I don’t like who are left of center.”

Yes, the term has suffered from semantic expansion. Yes, it is used by many to simply mean “people I dislike.” But so is fascist. So is Nazi. So is communist. That doesn’t mean these words have no clear referent. They do. It simply means they’ve been weaponized in popular discourse and subsequently overused, misused, and abused. Nevertheless, this thing we call “woke” turns out to be so real. So real, in fact, so concrete and so epistemically thick, that a team of Finnish scientists has managed to quantify it. Not merely to name it. To measure it and make it submit to the rigors of survey methodology. And what they found is likely to make you shout “Eureka!”

Ah Finland, the land of saunas, silence, and now, surprisingly based psychometrics. In a pair of studies totaling nearly 6,000 respondents — with the results published in the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology in March 2024 under the title “Construction and validation of a scale for assessing critical social justice attitudes” — researchers built and tested a scale to measure what they call Critical Social Justice Attitudes (CSJA). Think of it like a woke-o-meter. Do you believe everything is about power and identity? That microaggressions should be policed like felonies? That trans women in sports are #brave? Congrats, you just clocked a high CSJA score.

The researchers were meticulous. They sifted through 26 items, boiled them down to a seven-item scale, and tested the living daylights out of it. Each item was selected for ideological fidelity to the catechism: identity is essence, power is everything, and moral behavior is submission to the narrative. Of course, you already know the doctrine because it’s been installed in your Netflix queue and your child’s reading list. The results? CSJ attitudes were more common among women, social science students, and left-wing voters. No surprises there. But men, especially STEM bros trained in the hard, cold sciences, rejected every single item on the scale. The least woke creature in Finland, it turns out, is the male STEM student. Here’s a summary of the results:

• Men rejected nearly all CSJAS items, with average scores less than half of women.

• STEM guys had the lowest scores of all, rejecting every single item on the scale.

• In Study 1, male STEM students scored 0.75 out of 3, deep in “disagree” territory.

• In Study 2, male STEM faculty scored 0.82 out of 4, again the absolute floor.

So the more scientifically literate you are, the more likely you are to be anti-woke. But that’s not all. In psychometrics, there’s a standardized way to express how big a difference is between two group means, relative to the variability in the data, known as Cohen’s d. You get this by taking the raw difference between two averages — let’s say men and women’s scores — and dividing by the average amount of spread, or standard deviation, in those scores. This matters because results can be statistically significant yet still not matter much in real life. Here’s a Cohen’s d cheat sheet:

• 0.2 - meh

• 0.5 - interesting but not very dramatic

• 0.8 - wow, you need to see this

• 1.1 - holy shit

The study found a Cohen’s d of 1.2 between men and women, which means the average woman scored higher than about 88% of men. So yeah, holy shit. But also, high CSJA scores were not only linked with being female or scientifically illiterate, but also with higher levels of anxiety and depression. In other words, being woke not only correlates with ideological conformity and scientific ignorance, but also with being psychologically unwell. That is, they were notably less mentally well across multiple validated psychological metrics.

High-CSJA individuals scored 5.96 out of 21 on the GAD-7 anxiety scale, compared to 3.44 for low-CSJA individuals. That’s a 73% higher anxiety score. On a 1-to-5 depression scale, high-CSJA participants scored 1.31 vs. 0.8 for low-CSJA respondents, or about 64% higher. Additionally, high-CSJA respondents showed higher support for political violence, greater self-reported oppression experiences, and a greater external locus of control, meaning they are more likely to blame society and social structures for their problems rather than their own failings — and are therefore less likely to solve problems and get out of their emotional rut.

Nor is this study alone in its findings. A 2020 study, “Mental Illness and the Left,” found (bold mine):

Temporal analysis showed that the relationship between mental illness, happiness, and political ideology has existed in the General Social Survey data since the 1970s and still existed in the 2010s. Within-study meta-analysis of all the results found that extreme liberals had a 150% increased rate of mental illness compared to moderates. The finding of increased mental illness among left-wingers is congruent with numerous findings based on related constructs, such as positive relationships between conservatism, religiousness and health in general.

Also, a 2022 study, “The politics of depression: Diverging trends in internalizing symptoms among US adolescents by political beliefs,” found (bold mine):

Depressive affect (DA) scores increased for all adolescents after 2010, but increases were most pronounced for female liberal adolescents (b for interaction ​= ​0.17, 95% CI: 0.01, 0.32), and scores were highest overall for female liberal adolescents with low parental education (Mean DA 2010: 2.02, SD 0.81/2018: 2.75, SD 0.92). Findings were consistent across multiple internalizing symptoms outcomes. Trends in adolescent internalizing symptoms diverged by political beliefs, sex, and parental education over time, with female liberal adolescents experiencing the largest increases in depressive symptoms, especially in the context of demographic risk factors including parental education. These findings indicate a growing mental health disparity between adolescents who identify with certain political beliefs.

Of course, wokeness is not a mental illness. Not officially. Not yet. It does not appear in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5), nor do I expect it in the DSM-6, which is due out sometime before 2028. Nor does it render one eligible for disability benefits, though it may earn you a job at Google. But this is a distinction without a difference. After all, the DSM is partly a political document and its criteria are set not by Platonic truth but by committee vote. Point being, to say wokeness is not a disorder is merely to say that the regime has not yet declared it one — not that it is healthy or sane.

And yet, the clinical profile is there, hiding in plain sight. The extreme woke type — the kind who signs open letters, organizes callouts, and sees every micro-gesture as a macroaggression — is not a mystery. She is usually female and always neurotic, depressed, and anxious. She is uncertain of her agency and terrified of unstructured reality. She scores high on authoritarianism, albeit the kind that cancels rather than conquers. But she is not wrong, exactly. She is hurting. And she has found a theology of pain. A secular martyrdom, in which her suffering is reframed as moral clairvoyance.

This is not just coping. It’s conversion. She has been saved — by systems, structures, discourses, and trauma. To question her belief is to question her dignity. And so, she clings to it with the fervor of a drowning priest. The comparisons of wokeness to religion really are on to something, but they’re not quite complete. Her male counterpart — the effeminate, anxious man with soft hands and hard opinions — is no less symptomatic. He has made the rational calculation that survival in the modern power structure requires feminization, emotional display, and an affective submission to victimhood culture. Again, he’s not entirely wrong.

Once on a rooftop in Seoul, I saw a young white American man with a handlebar mustache, beanie, flannel shirt, skinny pants rolled at the bottom to reveal his ankles, vintage Converse, and a messenger bag. He looked like a walking Urban Outfitters clearance rack with a master’s degree in black studies. But I actually liked the look. I told him so. “I really dig the hipster look you’ve got,” I said. Unfortunately, the word hipster triggered him and he became outraged, threw his drink on the ground, and stormed over to complain to his black girlfriend who was, of course, wearing an Ankara-print head wrap and BLM shirt.

Weeks later, I saw him in a bar and went over to apologize for any misunderstanding. He immediately began screaming so loudly that the music stopped and the entire bar became focused on us. In the end, I simply walked away. But I don’t despise the dude. I feel sympathy for him. He’s not simply an asshole, but clearly mentally unwell and in need of help. And that’s exactly the kind of person I mean, someone so attached to the ideology that they become dysfunctional, dysregulated, and their capacity for prosocial interaction disintegrates.

The last study cited above is also interesting because it underscores one of the datapoints in the Finnish one, namely that predictors of being woke are scientific ignorance, having a mental disorder, and being female. Another way of thinking about this might be that wokeness itself, at least in its most extreme manifestation, is a mental disorder that primarily affects low-IQ women, though I would add to that low-IQ, effeminate men. So although wokeness is not a disorder in any clinical or diagnostic sense, it may function like a symptom cluster, reflecting or reinforcing certain psychological vulnerabilities.

Or, instead of a functional disorder, it could be that wokeness is a coping mechanism for the disorder itself. That is to say, the intense ideological identification we find among wokes could be a way for them to make meaning out of personal suffering, possibly caused by their anxiety or depression. Anxious about the state of the world? Frame everything as systemic injustice. Depressed and feeling powerless? Externalize responsibility to “structures.” Feel alienated or identity-fractured? Anchor yourself in group identity and moral certainty.

But before you chuckle to yourself about all this — “I knew these wokes were lunatics” — I’m afraid this is not a “win” in that sense. Because if true, it means they deserve our sympathy rather than our scorn. And if it’s not yet in the DSM, I suspect one reason could perhaps be because so many therapists have it too.