Former congressman Patrick Kennedy, 52, said the nation was suffering a mental health crisis worsened by a culture of silence.
“Denial runs deep, and that silence around these illnesses is what is contributing to our personal crises in our own families,” Kennedy told the Washington Examiner. “If we don’t speak up as a society, we see record rates of suicide, overdose, disability due to these illnesses left unchecked.”
Kennedy, who represented Rhode Island in the House of Representatives from 1995 to 2011, abused cocaine, alcohol, and opiates during his teenage years through his tenure in Congress, a struggle that led him to take an interest in mental healthcare. He was instrumental in passing the 2008 Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act. He sponsored the Foundations for Learning Act, to improve mental health services for schoolchildren, and the COMBAT PTSD Act.
On May 4, 2006, he crashed a car on Capitol Hill while high on prescription drugs, an event that compelled him to acknowledge his addiction to painkillers and seek treatment at the Mayo Clinic. In June 2009, he entered drug rehabilitation again and did not run for reelection in 2010.
His wife, Amy, has now entered politics. She announced in January that she would run as a Democrat in New Jersey to take the seat of Rep. Jefferson Van Drew, who was elected as a Democrat but switched to the Republican Party. She serves as the education director at the Kennedy Forum established by her husband and has made mental healthcare policy a part of her platform.
Kennedy established the forum in 2013 to raise awareness and discussion of mental illness. The mental health advocacy organization works with state and federal legislators and mental health advocacy groups to require insurance companies to cover mental healthcare services at the same rates as they would care for medical conditions. He is also on the advisory board of Mental Health for US, which offers mental health education and action plans for members of Congress.
“If you define issues in a way that can be assimilated into every separate advocacy group, then what you can do is take the combined influence of all those groups to rally behind a common mission and common agenda,” Kennedy said.
Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders include plans to improve access to mental healthcare in their healthcare platforms. Still, at campaign debates so far, the healthcare discussion has revolved around paying for “Medicare for all,” and mental health has not been a significant point of debate.
Kennedy said he was confident that voters want and need to hear more about what policymakers plan to do to make mental health treatment a priority rather than lumping it into plans to overhaul the entire current healthcare system.
“You can drop me in the middle of Trump country as a Kennedy, and I can have everyone in that group agree that this is the way to go,” Kennedy said. “What I can’t understand is why these candidates don’t address the fundamental problem, the silence, denial that we’re living in where we can be in a country where we’re losing twice as many as those died in the Vietnam War every year.” In 2017, 47,000 people died by suicide, up from 29,199, in 1999.
Still, mental health advocates have seen several victories for treating mental healthcare as equal to physical healthcare. One is the 1996 Mental Health Parity Act, which forced insurance companies to offer the same rates to people with mental illness treatment needs as those with physiological healthcare needs. Another is 2016’s Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Reform Act, which created the post of an assistant secretary for mental health and substance use to require new federal guidance on compliance with mental health and substance use disorder parity mandates. But Kennedy says it’s not enough.
“Any good healthcare plan needs to have a whole new view of how to design healthcare, so we’re not looking at this as medical care but rather community care,” Kennedy said. “President Kennedy didn’t talk about hospitals, pharmaceutical, but he kept the focus on community, so it’s about not thinking it’s someone else’s problem. We’ve got to have an approach that we’ll embrace people, or else we’ll ignore the divinity of all people, provide those supports when we need to have those.”
