Good For John Fetterman!

It is a pretty big deal for a sitting politician to go and get help for depression.

Senator John Fetterman from Pennsylvania was released from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, on Friday, after spending six weeks there dealing with a major depressive episode. On Sunday, he appeared on "CBS Sunday Morning" to talk to Jane Pauley about what happened, how he's doing now, and how he ended up being severely depressed after winning a major election.

"It's like, you just won the biggest, you know, race in the country," he said. "And the whole thing about depression is, is that objectively, you may have won, but depression can absolutely convince you that you actually lost. And that's exactly what happened. And that was the start of a downward spiral."

One of the things Fetterman told Pauley was that he felt "agnostic" about living. That while he never had any inclination toward self harm, he felt indifferent about dying and that if someone told him he had 18 months to live, he would have shrugged. Pauley tried to explain this to the audience as depression existing in a different sphere from love, and that it had nothing to do with his love for his children or not wanting to be there for them.

I would argue that it did, because he went and got the help — and if that is not an act of love and of strength, I don't know what is.

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That kind of feeling just has nothing to do with whether or not someone loves their kids or their spouse or anyone else. Depression, as Fetterman's wife Giselle pointed out in the interview, is not rational. Being unable to find the part of yourself that feels something about whether or not you wake up the next morning doesn't mean that part doesn't exist, it means you need help finding it. It's good that Fetterman got that help.

In recent years, we've been doing better (some of us anyway) about reducing the stigma around certain forms of mental illness, often just by talking about them and being open about them. I think people now are more likely to understand that a person having depression is not the same thing as someone just being overdramatic about sadness and that it doesn't mean that someone is "weak" — and attitudes like that feel pretty outdated.

Still, someone in Fetterman's position being as open about it as he's being is pretty radical. He joins a few other lawmakers who've been open about their mental health struggles. It's a big deal that he went and got help in such a visible way and that he's been open about the accommodations he needs to deal with that, about taking time off, as well as those he needs to deal with the side effects of the stroke he had last year. I will be glad to see him on the floor, kicking ass while visibly using those accommodations (like the closed captioning) and giving no fucks. It's important for people to see that.

It's worth noting that depression is also, in fact, a very common side effect of strokes.

"Depression is a common experience for stroke survivors," according to the American Stroke Association. "It’s often caused by biochemical changes in the brain. When the brain is injured, the survivor may not be able to feel positive emotions."

“The care that the experts at Walter Reed provided changed my life,” Fetterman wrote in a statement on Friday. “This isn’t about politics — right now there are people who are suffering with depression in red counties and blue counties. If you need help, please get help.”

It would, of course, be amazing if everyone could get the kind of help Fetterman was able to receive, if they were able to take that kind of time off of work or stay at a place like Walter Reed for six weeks, or even if more psychiatrists and therapists simply took health insurance. I would love to be able to say that if people need help, it is out there. I can't. At least not if we are talking about actual professional help. Because it's often very expensive and many of the mental telehealth services that have popped up in the last few years are complete scams (stay the absolute hell away from Cerebral, which specifically targets people with ADHD, doesn't cancel their subscriptions when they ask and counts on them not noticing that they're being charged $375 a month for several months).

It is worth noting that it is free to see a psychiatrist in every country in Europe and free in most of those countries to see a psychologist. They do have problems, of course — although many are problems we'd be lucky to have. Especially if they involved a $20-an-hour minimum wage.

In at least nine EU countries, people must pay additional fees for access to a psychologist via the public health care system. The price varies from country to country and even region to region. In Denmark, for example, the average additional cost incurred for a session covered by the public health care system is €51 ($61) — the equivalent of three hours of labor for someone who earns the country's average minimum wage of €2,428 per month.

But hey! Maybe this is how we start getting to a place where that kind of help is available and affordable for everyone, where people are able to take that kind of time off of work and ask for accommodations without feeling like they are going to be judged for them.

[ Philadelphia Inquirer ]

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