Jeo, Mookie, lets go back some steps. I feel that you don't understand what happened with these students (I am not blaming you I blame the news articles, I have read the scientific paper here. Links to the pdf https://tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/07448481.2018.1515763?needAccess=true is just due to the fact we are talking past each other here and we do not share the same knowledge. I find this frustrating but this is a universal human problem )

What happened here.

#1) No one was diagnosed with PTSD
#2) No one was diagnosed with any Anxiety Disorder
#3) The students didn't make any proactive / positive statements saying I have X.

What did happen

#4) 769 Students (out of 829 students) were forced to take a 15 question survey as part of getting a grade in their Introduction to Psychology class. (Thus these students are not a universal sample of Arizona State but specifically took this class as part of their major or as an elective. Remember people interested in psychology are not like other people.)

#5) Here is the survey they took, the 15 questions, you rate these questions into one of 4 categories A) Not at all B) Rarely C) Sometimes D) Often

A)
I avoided letting myself get upset when I thought about it or was reminded of it
I tried to remove it from memory
I stayed away from reminders of it
I felt as if it hadn't happened or wasn't real
I tried not to talk about it
I was aware that I still had a lot of feelings about it, but I didn't deal with them
I tried not to think about it
My feelings about it were kind of numb

I)
I thought about it when I didn't mean to
I had trouble falling asleep or staying asleep because of pictures or thoughts about it that came into my mind
I had waves of strong feelings about it
I had dreams about it
Pictures about it popped into my mind
Other things kept making me think about it
Any reminder brought back feelings about it

Note this above is not in the original order of the IES scale for I clustered the Avoidance Questions together and the Intrusive Questions (you can't regulate your emotions / affect and they just trigger.) In IES 1 the order is different so it is less obvious to the reader that the questions have some relation / cluster.

Well there are 4 choices for each question and the point value is A) Not at all worth 0 points, B) Rarely worth 1 point C) Sometimes worth 3 points, D) Often worth 5 points.

If you scored a total of 30 points out of 75 points in this survey you are part of the 25% Election-related distress symptoms. Note this is not saying you have an anxiety disorder, or ptsd, but if you were in a doctors office and you took this questionaire in the waiting room your doctor would do follow up questions, interview, etc. Aka these questionaires can't diagnose you but they can be a "test" that provides warning signs and help the doctor quantify how intense you feel.

Note this was IES version 1 from 1979. We now use since the mid 1990s IES-R that has 22 questions, and with this questionnaire 6 questions about hyperarousal symptoms. Furthermore IES revised has 5 choices (0 = Not at all; 1 = A little bit; 2 = Moderately; 3 = Quite a bit; 4 = Extremely) and the difference between choices is 1 point (0/1/2/3/4/) instead of 2 points (0/1/3/5)

Note why did the study pick 30 as the amount on IES version 1 for there is a debate in the medical literature of which number is bet. This is because IES is just finding a correlation and not causation, and in their studies there are different "confidence" intervals based on if you score 24, 26, 30, 44, 46, etc out of the possible score of 75.

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Put another way no one was diagnosed in this 769 sample size survey. Anyone that said this is indicative of PTSD did not understand the story or was embellishing it for media purposes.

Literally from the scientific study paper.

This study is good data, but useless data as it is now. It is wide data but not very deep, and no counterfactuals that would challenge the data. Furthermore this data has not been replicated with a different sample run by different people.

Why is this data news? I would argue it is not useful news, but it is news for this is the first published data like this. This makes this not good science, but news does not care about what is good science or what is data that has not been replicated, they see the word FIRST and they want to publish for that is what news culture is, due to the incentive structure of news culture.

Note all the people in their news stories that said the word "millennial" instead of an age range, are trying to sell you something, create outrage, opinions inside of you like a mind virus. Furthermore most of these articles were quoting the washingtion examiner (a 2nd hand source) and not looking at the original paper or study's authors.

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Back to my question, now that we all agree that no one was diagnosed with PTSD or an Anxiety Disorder, but a biased sample (college students who took a psychology course) scored "high" on a 15 questionnaire they just had to take for class

(and was it really high? Since they only had 4 choices and choice 3 was worth 3 points and 10 out of 15 times you pick choice 3 triggers the number 30 threshold cut off.)

...are these people an outrage, why does it trigger scorn, cause irritation, frustration, etc?

Another thing to point out is IES was not meant to be used in this manner. Some people may not want to talk about politics not due to anxiety, but because it is socially frustrating and sometimes costly. I may choose A) I tried not to talk about it and rate that a 5 and B)
I stayed away from reminders of it because I can't change the outcome, it is usually a waste of time arguing with people, blah, blah, blah, so on and so on for often arguing about politics is a waste of time.

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Yeah I spent way too much time and on this "news subject" and this very limited scientific study.