A Common Struggle: A Personal Journey Through the Past and Future of Mental Illness and Addiction by Kennedy Patrick J. & Fried Stephen

Author:Kennedy, Patrick J. & Fried, Stephen [Kennedy, Patrick J.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: Mental Health, Psychology, Medical, Political, Personal Memoir, Nonfiction, Biography & Autobiography, Addiction, Retail
ISBN: 9780698185111
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2015-10-05T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

After my crash at the Capitol, everyone wanted to know if I had been drunk that night. I wasn’t, but people who understand these illnesses realize that was the wrong question. Both addiction and depression come in cycles of waves, which you think you have adjusted to until a bigger one knocks you down. It isn’t all that revealing to chart how that last wave hit; it’s more important to understand what you were doing out there in the water in the first place.

So the real story of the week that forever changed my life starts not on the Wednesday before I crashed, but two days earlier, on the Amtrak Acela coming back from New York after a long day of meetings. During that three-hour ride, I drank—to the best of my recollection—eight straight vodkas from those little one-ounce travel bottles before arriving at Union Station.

I felt awful the next day, for all the obvious reasons, but there was also one developing medical issue: a lot of pain and discomfort in my whole lower abdomen. So in the early evening I went to the Attending Physician for the Congress and was given Phenergan liquid. It helped the pain and was a little sedating, so I took it again before bed.

The next day I had a lot of meetings, because a lot of mental health advocates were in town lobbying on the Hill. In between meetings, I was on the House floor voting on everything from increased accountability and transparency for lobbyists, to prohibitions on price gouging in the sale of gasoline and other fuels, to amending the Internal Revenue Code and ERISA to reform pension funding rules.

I then left to say a few words at a reception in the Rayburn Building for the “National Council”—the nickname of the National Council for Behavioral Health, one of the more powerful and ambitious forces in mental health. The National Council represented every state community mental health organization in the country. (Back then, in 2006, that was about 1,300 organizations with some 250,000 caregivers and staff; today they represent over 2,000 organizations and over 750,000 caregivers and staff.) In the two years since its new executive director, Linda Rosenberg, had taken over, the National Council had become a much more prominent political player, pushing to develop the kind of muscle that once only NAMI could exert. Linda had advocates in town from all over the country for their “Hill Day.”

I was scheduled to meet with her again the next morning, along with the executive directors of several other major mental health groups representing the leadership of the formidable Campaign for Mental Health Reform, which was now in its third year of being the most organized effort ever to lobby for change in behavioral healthcare. So, basically, a lot of people who mattered to me politically in the world of brain healthcare and advocacy were in town.

Because it would be a bad idea to be seen drinking at a National Council reception, before I went I walked around the corner to the Hawk ’n’ Dove.

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