I asked a psychiatrist why Americans are becoming ‘numb’ to violence
When I heard there had been another shooting near Donald Trump this weekend, I didn’t feel horror – in fact, I barely felt anything. And I’m not the only one.
Since Trump retook office in January 2025, America has been plagued by instances of political violence and extremist actions.
A 1960s activist once said, ‘Violence is as American as cherry pie.’
He has a point. The political violence Americans like myself have witnessed in the past few years isn’t new. It’s the cherry on top of layers of divisive elections, the rise of social media and the chaos of the 2020s.
Scrolling past devastating headlines and videos like they are memes, one after another, has numbed a generation to the horrors of what this violence means – not to mention the mass shootings.
I was sitting with a friend at a cocktail bar in Hoxton when our phones pinged and showed us the moment Charlie Kirk was shot and killed. Around us, drinks kept flowing as we refreshed our phones for updates.
Three months before that, I was on the train back to London from Oxford when I read the news that Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman was shot dead alongside her husband.
When shots were fired at Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, grazing his ear and killing an attendee, I was dancing at my friend’s birthday party when our phones buzzed.
The initial gasp after seeing these headlines has begun to fade into a helpless indifference.
Dr Sanam Hafeez, a neuropsychologist, said in The Cut that Trump’s second term has taught Americans a ‘learned passiveness’. I agree.
‘It can lead to this numbing effect where you get into a passive loop of doomscrolling, shrugging your shoulders, and reduced engagement,’ she said.
I grew up in the Columbine generation – I’m used to seeing reports and news headlines of atrocities and violence in the United States. My friends and I began doing active shooter drills at the age of five.
We are used to fear being omnipresent. For myself, this is more true – I sift through these terror-inducing events in my job as a journalist.
But I, along with plenty of my friends and colleagues, have admitted that instead of shock and horror, we’ve begun to feel numbness instead.
Not for lack of care, fear or empathy for those in the incidents, but from exhaustion of being inundated with tragedies daily.
Dr Darren O’Reilly, Psychologist and AuDHD expert at AuDHD Psychiatry, explained to me: ‘When you’re exposed to a threat over and over again, the brain just stops reacting at the same intensity. It’s not that people don’t care, it’s that they can’t stay switched on to that level all the time.’
Social media doesn’t help. ‘Doomscrolling’, the act of endlessly reading through gloomy news updates and bad-faith takes online, is wrecking the mental health of millions.
The more often we see distressing headlines, the less impact each one has, Dr O’Reilly added. ‘Not because it matters less, but because the brain can’t keep reacting at full volume,’ he explained. ‘You’re not just seeing one event, you’re seeing ten or twenty back to back, and the brain processes that as a constant threat,’ he said.
In a generation where news from across the globe flashes on your phone screen in seconds, it’s easy to become overwhelmed and burn out.
The numbness many Americans noted after the latest shooting in the US this weekend isn’t a sign of lower empathy – but higher information saturation.
‘What may look like apathy is often overload. People aren’t disengaging because they don’t care; they’re disengaging because they’ve reached their limit,’ Dr O’Reilly said.
‘Political violence was normalised in the United States a long time ago,’ Dr Dafydd Townley, Senior Teaching Fellow in International Security at the University of Portsmouth, told Metro on Sunday.
The United States, one could argue, was forged through political violence – the American Revolution. Dr Townley argued that it became mainstream with Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in the 1800s, but violence has always been a quiet undertone of American politics.
It’s only within the past few years that political violence seems to have been accepted as normal, expected.
Perhaps that’s why reports of another gunman near the Commander-in-Chief were met with numbness this time around.
Not for lack of empathy. Because we’re inundated with chaos, 24/7.
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
For more stories like this, check our news page.