"In my family, we just never talked about it."
Columbus Ledger-EnquirerOct 23, 2016
His father,
"It was such a source of shame for my family, and it was once again the silence," said
While in
"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
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,
"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.
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