Column: The psychological cost of threatening annihilation

How Leaders' Apocalyptic Rhetoric Is Rewiring Global Mental Health

When a sitting president publicly threatens the elimination of an entire nation, the consequences extend beyond geopolitics. They are psychological, measurable and far-reaching.

Recent statements from President Donald Trump referencing the potential obliteration of Iran have been analyzed primarily through political and legal frameworks. Less discussed is their impact on mental health at both the individual and collective level. Decades of research in trauma psychology and stress physiology demonstrate that perceived existential threat - particularly when it is credible and amplified - activates the body's stress response systems in ways that mirror direct exposure to danger.

This is not theoretical. For individuals in Iran and across the diaspora, such rhetoric can trigger acute stress responses, including hypervigilance, anxiety and anticipatory grief. For others around the world, including here in Hawaii, it contributes to a more diffused but still significant psychological burden: the reactivation of fears related to large-scale conflict, nuclear escalation and global instability. When threats originate from positions of authority, they carry increased psychological weight, as they are perceived as both plausible and actionable.

From a clinical standpoint, repeated exposure to high-intensity threat language can contribute to chronic stress activation. Over time, this can erode emotional regulation, increase baseline anxiety, and contribute to symptoms associated with trauma-related conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder. At the population level, this manifests as collective anxiety which creates an environment in which fear becomes normalized, and vigilance becomes a default state.

Empirical research supports this. Following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, a widely cited study led by Roxane Cohen Silver at the University of California-Irvine found that individuals who consumed high levels of media exposure to threat-related content reported significantly higher rates of acute stress symptoms than those with direct exposure. The implication is clear: repeated exposure to credible threats - especially when amplified through media and leadership rhetoric - can produce measurable psychological harm, even at a distance.

In Hawaii, the memory of the 2018 false missile alert remains a powerful example of how quickly perceived threat can translate into widespread psychological distress. That event demonstrated that the human nervous system does not distinguish sharply between imminent and possible threat when cues are credible. Rhetoric of annihilation operates in a similar psychological space.

There is also a broader systems impact. Language that normalizes extreme outcomes shifts collective expectations about conflict, potentially lowering the threshold for escalation while simultaneously increasing public desensitization. This combination, and heightened anxiety alongside normalization of catastrophic scenarios, is particularly destabilizing from a mental health perspective.

Leadership inevitably shapes not only policy, but psychological climate. The repeated use of existential threat language does not function solely as strategy; it alters how individuals and communities perceive safety, risk, and the future.

The consequences of that shift are not abstract. They are lived - in bodies, in families and in communities around the world.

Gary Norman is a psychotherapist and consultant living in Pahoa.