During the springtime of 2017, I told a good friend that I was worried about almost everyone we knew. Anyone politically left of center seemed to be anxious, depressed, addicted to everything bad, and looking forward to nothing.

“It’s Trump,” my friend said, downing his third Bloody Mary before lunchtime. “We’re all falling apart.”

We weren’t alone. The first Trump administration caused deep mental distress among liberals, leftists, and many apolitical people with a strong sense of human decency. The problem was sometimes derisively called “Trump derangement syndrome,” but it was real. The American Psychological Association found that the outcome of the 2016 election caused a dramatic spike in American stress levels. Shrinks reported an increase in patients severely distressed over politics; at the time, I remember one therapist telling me that some days, his patients talked about nothing else. That psychic stress took a physical toll, with an increase in stress-related ailments from headaches to cardiac arrhythmias. Calls to suicide hotlines went up.