Political mental health is distinct from mental health and has unique political correlates

Academics and pundits alike suggest politics harms our health. In the literature on mental health and politics -work that spans different disorders and political outcomes-there has been a turn to domain-specific measures of `political health'. However, when studying the complex relationship between mental health and politics, it is not yet clear if we need a disorder specific or general approach and to that end, if there is a need for domain-specificity (i.e., what it might contribute beyond traditional mental health measurements). To investigate this, we test and compare the construct and predictive validity of domain-specific political mental health (PMH) and general mental health (MH) in a study conducted in the Dutch population. Through our tests of construct validity, we find PMH is an independent construct to MH. Our tests of predictive validity demonstrate that while both PMH and MH have a range of political correlates, from political participation to external political efficacy, it is PMH that has stronger and broader political associations -- to affective polarization, ideological extremism and news aversion, among others. In the discussion we outline a research agenda for moving forward the study of mental health and politics in light of our findings: our results imply that domain-specificity is needed to properly identify the extent to which mental health is connected to engagement with politics and who may be the most affected and importantly, that PMH and MH have more far reaching political consequences than previously assumed.