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"In my family, we just never talked about it."

Columbus Ledger-Enquirer - 10/23/2016

Oct. 22--When President John F. Kennedy signed the Community Mental Health Act of 1963, he thought about his sister, Rosemary, who suffered from a psychiatric disorder.

His father, Joseph Kennedy, Sr., had arranged for her to have a lobotomy, which was a common practice for dealing with mental illness at the time. As a result, Rosemary was placed in a facility in Wisconsin, and no one in the family saw her for 30 years.

"It was such a source of shame for my family, and it was once again the silence," said Patrick Kennedy, the son of Kennedy's brother, the late U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy. "And when President Kennedy signed that Community Mental Health Bill, his words at the signing were, 'Those with mental illness and intellectual disabilities need no longer be alien to our affections or beyond the help of our communities.' "

Patrick Kennedy is a former Rhode Island congressman and one of the leading mental health advocates in the country. He shared the story at the Sue Marie and Bill Turner Servant Leadership Gala held at the Convention and Trade Center on Thursday night. Kennedy said his uncle had a vision 50 years before its time, and the country still is struggling with how to treat people with mental illness.

While in Congress, Patrick Kennedy authored legislation called the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act to ensure brain-related illnesses be treated on par with illnesses associated with the rest of the body when it comes to insurance and treatment.

"I'm here to say we still don't have it in our country," Kennedy said Thursday. "The law was passed nearly a decade ago, and because of shame and stigma, the fact that people aren't willing to stand up and be counted, there's no political pressure on the powers that be to push back on insurance companies to require them to follow the law that simply says, 'Treat these illnesses like you would treat any other illness.' That's basically the fight."

Kennedy spoke from personal experience, describing his own struggle with drug addiction and depression. Two years before passing the mental health and addiction bill, he was admitted to Mayo Clinic for an Oxycontin addiction. After going through detox, he had trouble sleeping when he went back to Capitol Hill. He took Ambien and Phenergan, and the next morning he jumped into his car and raced to the capital thinking he had a boat to catch. On the way, he almost hit a Capital police officer, and he crashed into a security barrier.

The next morning, he knew something bad had happened, but he couldn't recall the incident. When he went to work, his chief of staff told him people had been saying that he was drunk and ought to resign. The press had taken photos of the car.

His father called and told him it looked like a little fender-bender and it would blow over, nothing to worry about.

"That's indicative of his generation; if you really can't see it on the outside, then it doesn't matter," Kennedy said. "In my family, we just never talked about it."

Kennedy said he grew up in a home where both of his parents drank heavily. His mother was an alcoholic and suffered from debilitating depression, but the family never talked about it. They also didn't talk about his mother's mother who also was an alcoholic and died drunk in her bathtub.

His father, Ted Kennedy, saw both of his brothers brutally murdered -- a traumatic experience that affected him for the rest of his life and was never addressed.

"It's just that type of silence around these issues that I write about in my book 'A Common Struggle,' " he said. "Because, Lord knows, I have a very incredible family history as part of the history of this country; these incredible relatives who were so well known, but in many respects the silence that my family had around these issues is the same silence that most other families have."

Kennedy said mental illness is a young people's disease, with 50 percent of all mental episodes occurring by age 14, and 75 percent by 24. He would like to see more screening for family history and preventive treatment.

"If you wait until people who had diabetes ultimately went blind or had their legs amputated before they got care, that wouldn't be such a smart way of treating diabetes," he said. "You wouldn't say, 'Go back out and don't come back in before you're half dead and we will treat you.' But that's exactly how we treat mental illness and addiction."

Kennedy said mental illness and addiction should be treated as medical issues, not crimes.

"John Kennedy was trying to get people out of asylums in 1963," he said. "... And what ended up happening, the money never followed (people) out into the community in the years and decades that followed. So people ended up on the streets, and they ended up re-institutionalized in the new asylums, and the new asylums are our jails and prisons."

Alva James-Johnson: 706-571-8521, @amjreporter

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(c)2016 the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer (Columbus, Ga.)

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