When Rep. Tom Kean went missing from Congress for nearly four months, the speculation ran wild. Where was he? Was he hiding something? Was his marriage in trouble? Had he done something to be ashamed of?
Reporters camped outside his New Jersey home. A colleague said he hadn't heard from him. The mystery became a campaign issue in a swing district that could help decide control of the House.
I never wondered what was wrong with him. I knew. And quite frankly, I wanted to scream at everyone, "Leave the guy alone. He needs space, and lots of it."
Today, Kean stood on the House floor and confirmed it: severe depression, a long hospital stay, a diagnosis he didn't see coming and couldn't put a timeline on. "It is physical. It is emotional," he said. "Until you experience it yourself, it is difficult to fully understand how powerful this illness can be."
It's a trite saying, but in this case it's right on the mark: truer words have never been spoken.
I have experienced it. I've written and spoken for years about the suicide attempts, the ICU stays, a Thanksgiving Day overdose, days in a psych ward. I've written about the alcohol I used to numb the pain through a lifetime.
And I've written about a two-week disability leave that became an entire year as I fought to recover. I disappeared. I had to. I had no choice.
So when the news broke about Kean, I didn't see a politician dodging accountability or inventing a clever excuse to go off the grid. I saw a man doing the only thing severe depression most of the time allows — disappearing.
That's the part people outside this illness rarely understand. It isn't just a temporary sadness, or a bad week. When I started telling friends and family why I'd gone incommunicado, more than one person said, "Oh, I get depressed all the time."
That is not what this is. Emphatically not. Kean is right: you only get it if you've lived it.
It is your mind turning against the very mechanisms that let you function, your judgment, your sense of worth, your ability to imagine tomorrow might be better. It all disappears, replaced by overwhelming hopelessness.
When it hits that hard, showing up becomes physically impossible. Not difficult. Impossible. The instinct isn't to explain yourself to colleagues, constituents, or the press. The instinct is to retreat, to vanish from a world that suddenly feels like it's only watching you fail. And fail miserably.
And everywhere you look, and I mean everywhere, there's darkness. No light. It's a fright I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy.
Writing these words and recalling that pain is cathartic, but it's also difficult to face the road ahead when you're filled with anguish.
That's why it's so exhausting to finally admit you need help. You fall apart to the point where help is the only way to survive. But up against that reality is the stigma of the disease. At least it was for me. Not only did I think I didn't need a psychiatrist or therapist, I worried about what others would think of me.
When I went on disability after being diagnosed, I came back after a couple of weeks and found myself treated like damaged goods. I was sidelined, regarded with the caution people reserve for something they don't understand and would rather not deal with.
Compare it to someone returning from surgery or a broken bone. Their desk is filled with balloons and cards. That didn't happen to me.
That treatment didn't help me heal. It did the opposite. I went back out on disability, and this time I stayed out for nearly ten months. The job that was supposed to be waiting for me wasn't really waiting. The colleagues who should have offered support offered distance instead.
That’s why it’s so important not to come back to the real world until you’re ready.
Part of the awkwardness from others is the fact that the stigma is still very real, and it punishes the very people trying to do the responsible thing by stepping back to get well. In defense of those who were awkward toward me, I've learned over the years, they simply didn't know how to respond.
This is why I believe Kean deserves credit, not criticism, for both halves of the choice he made. He was right to go silent when he needed to, because for those of us who've been there, silence is sometimes the only form of self-preservation available. Severe depression does not negotiate with your calendar or your campaign schedule.
And he was right to come forward today, because disclosure is the only thing that ever actually loosens the grip of stigma. Every politician, every public figure, every ordinary person who says "this happened to me, and here is what it looked like" makes it a little easier for the next person to ask for help instead of disappearing for good.
When I went through it, I craved hearing other people's survival stories, because they gave me hope for my own. I always said that if writing about my experience helped even one person, it was enough. I know Kean feels the same way.
Recovery, for me, has never come from sheer willpower alone, though it helped at times. It came from psychiatric care, from therapy, from medication, and eventually from getting honest about how much alcohol I was using to numb what therapy was trying to surface.
None of that happens while you're still showing up, pretending to be normal for the people around you. Getting better requires stepping fully away from your life so you can rebuild it, out of view, on your own timeline, without an audience grading your recovery in real time.
Kean said that asking for help isn't a weakness, it's a strength. I say that often, and I'm glad he said it from the floor of the House, where it will reach people who might never read something like this.
The more of us who say it, in whatever rooms we're given, the smaller that stigma gets, and the more people might choose to come forward instead of disappearing for good.
