Many Americans suffering post-election blues

[The1calledTKE]

NEW YORK - It’s a long way from the Manhattan office of psychoanalyst Sherman Pheiffer to the Cambridge, Mass., practice of psychologist Jaine Darwin. But both are in blue states that voted heavily for John Kerry, and on the day he conceded, they heard plenty of distress about the election.

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“My patients were incredulous, depressed, angry, very frightened,” Pheiffer said. “Everyone talked about feeling frightened (about) the future of this country.”

Darwin heard the same kinds of reactions. At the end of the campaign, Massachusetts Democrats “kind of let themselves hope Kerry would pull it out,” she said, so patients felt “the roller coaster had crashed. I think we all had a little post-Red Sox magical thinking.”

And among Kerry campaign volunteers, of course, the loss was still stinging the day after the concession.

“If I happened to be on a tranquilizer or Prozac, I would have to triple my dose,” joked Sam Feldman, a 75-year-old retired businessman who lives on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts but who volunteered for Kerry in Florida.

Elizabeth Marshall, a volunteer at the Centre County Democrats headquarters in Pennsylvania, said people there showed “bereavement, almost. People feel that something they had, which was hope for imminent change, has been taken from them.”

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6417285

[PhiPsiRuss]

Well, if there wasn't so much demagoguery, people would be able to look at things rationally and they would not be freaking out.

It felt like an adrenlin rush and once the campaigning and bashing of one another and voting was over with.... it was a crash and burn feeling . win or no win felt kinda anxious blue once all the grandstanding was done.

[sugar and spice]

My therapist said he's heard a lot of it over the past couple days.

I don't think it's irrational for people to feel this way. I have a friend who has been working on the Kerry campaign for the past fifteen months. Obviously, to invest that big of a part of yourself into something that you believed in that strongly -- of course there's going to be a letdown. And for the rest of us who didn't volunteer on a campaign, or only volunteered marginally, there's still the potential to be scared as hell of where this country is going, which I don't think is unreasonable at all.