“Politics comes up every day in my practice,” Jonathan Alpert, a psychotherapist in New York and Washington, D.C., said. “For some, it’s Mamdani or Cuomo. For many, it’s Trump. I’ve had people begin sessions with a kind of ritual rant, unloading the latest headline before we’ve even started.” Every therapist I spoke with mentioned their patients’ tendency to doomscroll, and to bring up specific articles and social-media posts that have agitated them. (One therapist said that some of her patients have fixated on YouTube videos of Mamdani’s early rap career, finding them “very upsetting.” “They’ll say, ‘Have you heard about this? Did you see this? This rap video where he’s saying that he’s in alignment with Hamas?’ ”)

Naturally, these anxieties peak around the time of an election. Jessica January Behr, a licensed psychologist, and the founder and director of Behr Psychology, a practice on the Upper West Side, said that, most of the time, her work is exciting—or, at the very least, unpredictable. “You never know what people are going to come in and talk about,” she said. “Every hour is totally different.” But then an election happens. “It’s a rough week of work for us,” she explained. “It’s, like, ‘Oh, God, I’m about to sit through four days of eight hours of everybody talking about the election.’ ” Post-election, it’s also common for patients to book extra appointments, coming in twice in one week, Schreyer-Hoffman said.

Part of what’s exhausting about these political discussions is that they’re mostly one-sided, as is the nature of therapy. “It’s not really a conversation, right?” Behr said. “You’re in a different position as a therapist.” The result, she said, is a “whiplash of projections,” with patients often assuming that their therapists are in complete agreement with them. Many patients have even begun requesting therapists who have a certain worldview. A recent example of a referral, from a therapist Listserv: “Ideally therapist is Palestinian, but someone aligned with anti-Zionist values could also be a good fit.” Another person, searching for a therapist on behalf of their friend, wrote, “They are only interested in working with someone who identifies as a Republican and is willing to self-disclose about that.” (The person added that it was O.K. for the therapist to be out-of-network.)

Most of the therapists I spoke with said that they take pains to maintain neutrality, even when they actively disagree with what their clients are saying. Alpert takes a different approach: “I always push back,” he told me. “My job isn’t to agree with patients; it’s to hold up a mirror.” He added, “Therapy, when done right, should be one of the few places left where people can safely confront disagreement.”

Over the summer, a patient came into Alpert’s office in Manhattan, after witnessing an assault outside her apartment. “This is why we need Mamdani,” she told Alpert—who then went on to write an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal about how misguided her thinking was. He argued that Mamdani’s public-safety plan, which involves reducing the role of the police and hiring more social workers, would actually contribute to the kind of urban decline that his patient was concerned about. (Schreyer-Hoffman said that crime has become a frequent subject of her sessions, as well: “So many of our patients have had something happen in the street,” she said. “A lot of them feel very unsafe—people who are active users of the subway, who walk around a lot, who have seen the homeless population explode.”)

In his article, Alpert likened Mamdani to a bad therapist—one who offers people comfort rather than actual solutions. (This is notwithstanding the fact that Mamdani’s main appeal is his solutions-oriented approach: freeze the rent, make buses free, provide universal child care.) Alpert said that he’s seen people across the political spectrum consumed with rage in the past several years. “Some of it borders on homicidal,” he said. “I’ve had patients in their twenties and in their seventies openly wish for Trump’s death.” Alpert, who has appeared as a commentator on Fox News, says he’s lost patients for pushing back during sessions. “Some people don’t want therapy,” he told me. “They want affirmation of their politics.” Along those lines, sometimes patients seek validation for their individual choices: “They’ll ask, ‘Should I vote for Mamdani even though his policies scare me?’ or ‘Would voting for Sliwa make me a bad person?’ What they’re really asking is, ‘Can you reassure me that my anxiety means I’m morally right?’ ”