Fetterman worried revealing mental health struggle would end career

Senator John Fetterman has revealed he was concerned admitting his struggles with mental health would 'end' his political career. 

The Pennsylvania Democrat said he believed revealing that he was undergoing treatment for clinical depression 'would be the end of my career.'

Fetterman, 54, checked himself into Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for depression last February. 

'I was desolate for, for the first couple of weeks' after the story came out Fetterman told NBC anchor Kristen Welker.

'I don't know what the what kind of impact that would have on my family or anything. 




Senator John Fetterman (left) revealed he was concerned admitting his struggles with mental health would 'end' his political career



'So I really didn't know what would happen at that point' the lawmaker explained. 

The first term senator, who was later discharged in March, recalled a 'very dark' episode in December 2022 when he was unable to get out of bed.

'People hear all their lives about "I can't get out of bed," and you really can't understand what that really means. You can't get out of bed until it happens to you. And it did', he explained.

Fetterman's mental health deteriorated after suffering a stroke on his Senate campaign trail in May 2022.

He described his depression as 'kind of like a slow burn, how it kept going along, along, along.'

'And then, after the stroke hit, then I was on the other side, and Psicoleg it was a different kind of a challenge, because I knew that everything and anything is going to be weaponized by the other side,' he said.

After he won the Senate race in 2022, he said, his depression 'accelerated and got worse.'

'And I really scared my kids, and they thought: "You won, Dad. Why aren't we enough? Why are you still so sad? Why are you even more sad?" And it was hard to explain why I was. 




Fetterman (pictured) checked himself into Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for depression last February





Fetterman's mental health deteriorated after suffering a stroke on his Senate campaign trail in May 2022.

'And, of course, a nine-year-old child wouldn't understand that,' he said. 'And it was awful, and that's when it continued to get more and more intense.' 

Whilst an in-patient the politician was 'walled-off' with no access to TV or the internet.

Initially he had no contact with his family but eventually his children were able to visit, a moment he described as a 'watershed.'

'I was overwhelmed that they embraced me and they were so happy to see me,' he said. 

'It was like a breakthrough', he added.

Fetterman has recently broken publicly with the grassroots activists who pushed him to power since the outbreak of war in Gaza. Now, some of those progressives have labeled him '#GenocideJohn' over his airtight support for Israel.

'What I have found out over the last couple years is that the right, and now the left, are hoping that I die,' the Pennsylvania Democrat told the New York Times. 

'There are ones that are rooting for another blood clot.'




Fetterman has recently broken publicly with the grassroots activists who pushed him to power since the outbreak of war in Gaza





Fetterman (right) with Rabbi Jeffrey Myers of the Tree of Life synagogue (left) at the Commemoration Ceremony on the fifth anniversary of the Tree of Life synagogue attack on October 27 in Pittsburgh





John Fetterman at a March for Israel rally earlier this month 

Fetterman said he has soured on progressives and their 'purity tests.'

'It's just a place where I'm not,' he said. 'I don't feel like I've left the label; it's just more that it's left me.'

Ceasefire protesters have swarmed his office on Capitol Hill, and yet their onetime torch bearer has refused to relent and join the calls for Israel to cease its bombing campaign.

A deep intra-party rift has broken out among Democrats as the death toll in Gaza continues to rise and even President Biden has accused Israel of an 'indiscriminate bombing campaign.'

Fetterman, meanwhile, plastered photos of Israeli hostages to the wall outside his office and draped himself in an Israeli flag in photos.

'I do find it confusing where the very left progressives in America don't seem to want to support really the only progressive nation in the region that really embraces the same kind of values I would expect we would want as a society,' Fetterman said.


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