Sen. John Fetterman has admitted that he was “not the kind of senator” Pennsylvania deserved while he was hospitalized for depression.
Fetterman made the remarks during an interview with NPR, in which he also said that doctors had advised him to stay away from news reports and social media — despite being a senator.
“I thought every night when I was laying in bed when I was in the hospital — like what if I just would have done something about this before, and I could kick myself and I just think about how my family wouldn’t [have been] put through it and my constituents,” Fetterman said. “But now that I am back, I’m really committed to … letting people know: to anyone that has any of these feelings, there’s a path, and you can get better.”
Fetterman suffered a severe stroke during his campaign last year, which left him unable to hold conversations without using closed captioning. NPR noted that he was using it during the interview.
Fetterman admitted that he did not take time to recover from his stroke before taking office.
“After I won, I still felt that depression — like, I felt lost,” he said. “I wasn’t elated. I wasn’t happy about it. I was relieved that it was over. But at the same time, I never had the opportunity to recover from the stroke, and I had depression, and a lot of just the stress and everything. [I] really wasn’t able to address it.”
Fetterman started his term being unable to properly serve, but the glowing interview praised him for being open about his depression.
“I was so depressed that I didn’t even realize I was depressed,” he said. “I didn’t even understand it. This, to me, just became the new normal. I wasn’t realizing [that] I wasn’t eating. I didn’t realize that I wasn’t really drinking much.”
The senator also admitted, “I dropped 25 pounds. And sometimes I would say things, incoherent things, and I would become kind of just [disoriented], and getting lost walking around in Washington.”
