Like many others ...I was wrong about Fetterman.
The Pennsylvania senator has always been a character: a hulking six-foot-eight, doing interviews in hoodies, not nearly liberal enough to satisfy much of his Democratic Party.
Fetterman, you’ll recall, suffered a stroke just before he won the Democratic nomination for his seat.
His wife Gisele noticed a drooping of his mouth and took him to a nearby hospital, which, fortunately, was 10 minutes away.
The surgery saved him, but he had trouble understanding words and phrases, communicating only with an iPhone with closed-captioning.
Fetterman’s condition improved, "but in hindsight I should have quit."
He was constantly mentioned on Fox, or under attack. "Uncle Festerman [in an] oversize gym-rat costume," "unfit to run," "the guy can’t talk," a "wax dummy," "where does the man end and the machine." And on social media "Vegetable. Moron. Retard."
This got in his head: "a defining quality of depression, the building blocks of which I had probably struggled with ever since I was a kid. My parents were 19 when I was conceived, and I have always felt it was because of me that my parents were unable to follow their own dreams. When your self-image is negative, as mine was growing up, you gravitate toward shame. You gravitate toward feeling unwanted."
"This inclination persisted even as an adult…"
"Is this my life now?"
Then came the debate against Oz. He was awful.
"This was a make-or-break moment that would determine the outcome of the election, and I had wilted. I’d choked."
"For months, I was suicidal. Paranoid. Not eating. Not sleeping. Not speaking. Not functioning. Resigned. Ashamed. Despairing. Despairing everywhere I was. Up was down, and down was up." He won anyway by 5 points.
Gisele told him "I could not come home until I was back to being myself: The impact on our kids was just too great." So the senator moved in with his parents.
"By February, I wasn’t eating, and I wouldn’t talk to anybody..."
"I began to feel more alive and animated than I had in months. I was present. I felt energy."
"There were still enormous challenges, though. I was terrified to see my family."
"A young therapist-in-training came in to talk to me one day. 'Gisele and the kids are thinking about coming to visit,' she said."
"I don’t think that’s a good idea." The next day: "The kids are better off without me."
"At that point, she stepped out of her professional mode and said the most important thing that has ever been said to me in my life:"
"Children need their daddy."
The visit at a Wendy’s went well. Everyone was relaxed. He needed their love.
I don’t care if you like John Fetterman or not, whether you think he should resign or not, whether you think he’s an awful senator or not. If you can read that without being moved, you don’t have a heart.
Depression is a scourge on our society. Many people are on all kinds of medications to try to cope with it, or in long-term therapy, or both.
I’ve never read such a brutally candid account of what it’s like to struggle with depression, let alone from an incumbent office-holder. It certainly deepened my understanding of this deadly disease, and I hope yours as well.
Howard Kurtz is a media and political analyst and the former host of FOX News Channel's MediaBuzz. Based in Washington, D.C., he joined the network in 2013 and regularly appears on Special Report with Bret Baier and The Story with Martha MacCallum among other programs.
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