When he looks back on the past year—a year in which he nearly died, became a U.S. Senator, and nearly died again—it is the debate that John Fetterman identifies as the breaking point.
“The debate lit the mitch,” he says, then shakes his head in frustration and tries again. The right word is there in his brain, but he struggles to get it out. “Excuse me, that should be lit the mitch—” He stops and tries again. “Lit the match,” he says finally.
Oct. 25, 2022: the date is lodged in his mind. “I knew I had to do it,” he tells me. “I knew that the voters deserve to have what, what the stroke has done to me—transparency that way.” As soon as it was over, he knew it had not gone well. “I knew at that moment that I was going to be considered—consider myself—like, a national embarrassment,” he says. And then the darkness came.
The Pennsylvania Democrat is sitting behind a big wooden desk in his sparsely furnished Senate office. His 6-ft. 8-in. frame is clad in a white hoodie, gray sweat shorts, and sneakers—a sartorial signature he has maintained despite Senate rules. (For most votes, Fetterman discovered, he can stand just off the Senate floor and give a thumbs-up or -down to the clerk, thereby avoiding having to put on a suit.) Surrounding us are three iPads propped up on stands—two facing him, one facing outward—that transcribe our conversation in real time, helping compensate for the auditory-processing difficulties brought by his stroke just over a year ago.
Fetterman has settled in to talk, through tears, about his treatment for and recovery from the severe depression that followed. In February, he checked into the neuropsychiatry unit at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center outside D.C., where he remained for more than six weeks. By the time he got there, he was a shell of himself—gaunt, listless, barely able to function. “I didn’t think I could be fixed,” he says. He didn’t actively contemplate suicide, he tells me, but he would have welcomed death if it came. “If the doctor said, oh, by the way, you have six months left, I would have been like, OK, whatever,” he says. “That’s how bleak it was.” He considers himself lucky to have survived.
Instead, Fetterman emerged transformed, he says, and has become an evangelist for the treatment he believes saved his life. This openness about a serious, ongoing mental-health ordeal has put Fetterman in uncharted territory for an American politician. A half-century ago, Senator Thomas Eagleton, selected as George McGovern’s running mate, was dropped from the Democratic presidential ticket when it emerged he had previously been hospitalized for depression. Since then, other politicians have been more open about mental illness, but typically in the past tense. “There’s been a transition in terms of stigma around these issues,” says Minnesota Democrat Tina Smith, who disclosed her youthful battle with depression in a Senate floor speech in 2019. “I was talking about my experiences when I was much younger. That’s very different from the leap of faith John has taken.”
When Fetterman set out to shatter that long-standing taboo, it was far from clear what the response would be. But he has been met, by and large, with an outpouring of
