The Docsplainer

Good heavens yes I vote.

About 10 years ago, I had a kid pipe up in the back of the class to say she never paid any attention to elections because “politics has nothing to do with me” and after I picked my jaw up off the floor I vowed never to fail to teach this:

Psychology is not all between your ears. It is geographic, economic, and embedded in the history of families, communities, and nations. It is influenced by and influenced language and religion. But most of all it is gendered, racialized, and IT IS POLITICAL.

That attitude seemed especially mind-blowing to me, coming from a woman. We only got the vote in my grandmothers’ generation and I can’t imagine a more powerless feeling than not having it.

But beyond that, politics has everything to do with your individual psychology.

Every vote is a vote for the kind of world we want to live in. It is a statement about what we believe about our place in it and in the moral value of its resources and inhabitants (by which I mean all sentient beings).

When I vote, I’m voting on whether prejudice (social psychology) is going to be allowed to injure little kids’ mental health and drive teens to suicide (by which I mainly mean trans phobia these days). I’m voting for whether appropriate, empirically-supported mental health care will be available to all or whether we’ll fund what amounts to Christian nationalist ‘re-education’ camps–or have none at all.

I’m voting for what histories we’ll remember and learn from and whose stories we will suppress or lie about–that relates to the psychology of memory and learning, and to personality psychology (identity).

I’m voting for who gets to participate fully in all levels of society, from business to education to sports, all of which psychologists study, and who’s excluded, who has a bright future here and who’s left despairing (social psych again). I’m voting for normal psychological development and against permanent cognitive damage from viruses run rampant and polluted air and water (cognitive psych, developmental psych, and the biological bases of psychology all are areas of scientific study that address this).

I’m voting for whether disabled kids get the same shot at an education as everyone else, and whether certain kids are going to be made to feel that they are, as family therapy pioneer Virginia Satir once put it “bad, or mad.”

So heck yeah, I vote. And I want you to vote, too, even if your world view differs radically from mine. It’s how a democracy works.