The Rise and Fall of the Eagleton Campaign: An Editorial Observation of Senator John Fetterman on the Issues of Mental Health

Dr. Peggy Drexler is authoring two books about gender and family as well as a book on women who behave badly that will be published in August of 2024 by Simon & Schuster. Her latest film, “King Coal,” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2023. Her opinions are expressed in this commentary. View more opinion on CNN.

It was a campaign that ended before it began. McGovern dropped Eagleton from the ticket and was trounced by Nixon.

Eagleton had been hospitalized for depression and undergone shock therapy, according to the rumors. The suggestion of any sort of mental illness was enough, even though Eagleton had gone on to build a successful career.

50 Years later, depression is no longer an outlier. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, an estimated 21 million adults in the United States have had at least one major depression episode. One in four Americans has suffered from some form of mental illness, according to a new report.

And yet, when Senator John Fetterman sought inpatient treatment for clinical depression last month, his openness about the diagnosis was still seen (and, thankfully, largely lauded) as unusually forthright, with the White House calling his actions “brave.” And this is true!

The good news is that he sought out the helps he needs—and that, at least so far, his supporters seem to be compassionate. As they should be: Besides the fact that, statistically, most of us have been impacted by depression in some form or another, many people do not get their depression treated. It’s a sign of strength to know when you need help and to get it.

The Lasso event: How much mental health is the defining public health crisis of our time? (An overview of the discussion by Stewart and Van Duyne)

Conservative voices immediately questioned if Fetterman was fit to serve. (Of course, more liberal readers may also have political motives when unquestionably backing Fetterman.)

We should know that our leaders have health issues to deal with, but we should also know that millions of Americans battle depression and lead productive lives. We aren’t living in the 1970s anymore; we’ve come far in our understanding of an illness that affects so many people.

If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health, please call the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 to connect with a trained counselor or visit 988lifeline.org.

Editor’s Note: Sara Stewart is a film and culture writer who lives in western Pennsylvania. The views expressed here are solely the author’s own. There are more opinions on CNN.

Newt Gingrich, who has written about the importance of mental health treatment, slammed the Lasso event as “shallow” on a Fox News appearance. And Texas Congresswoman Beth Van Duyne tweeted of the event, “What the hell is Biden doing with his time?”

“We shouldn’t be afraid to ask for help ourselves,” Sudeikis said in the White House press room. It does take a lot, since mental health is something that has a negative stigma to it and it doesn’t need to be that way.

Absolutely, agreed. Yet watching clips of the event, my main takeaway was: Truly, how is there still a stigma around mental illness? Could anything, at this point, be more ubiquitous than people struggling with anxiety and depression? If I can find you a person who hasn’t done anything since watching “The Great British Baking Show” seven years ago, I’ll show you how much you have missed out.

Statistics, and most of the experts, will tell you that large swaths of this country’s population are not okay. US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy calls mental illness “the defining public health crisis of our time.”

But how depressing (so to speak) that we still have to frame it that way. There are a few politicians in this country and around the world who have had the same struggles in the past, though their stories are still singular enough that every such event goes through a cycle of praise for the sheer courage of openness.

Mental Health: After the Lasso-Biden Summit, What Have We Learned in Social Media? The Misleading Report on Twitter and Facebook

The Lasso-Biden summit at least was well-timed, arriving shortly after a baffling study in the British Medical Journal announced that during the pandemic, “changes in general mental health, anxiety symptoms, and depression symptoms have been minimal to small with no changes detected in most analyses.”

I and a lot of other people are limited in what they can say. Social media responded with an impressive and bleakly hilarious torrent of suggestions to the contrary, some of the best of which are helpfully rounded up here.

So many people took issue that Twitter added an advisory that “the review admits that it was lacking in data for many vulnerable groups, and that the findings in it can’t necessarily be applied to everyone.” Yes except for women and young people and the poor, as one person put it. Great study.

You might think Republicans would come out in force with a show of support for the Biden-Lasso summit, purporting to be big fans of this topic. But no: Members of the party that reliably uses mental illness as a talking-point distraction from any discussion of gun control after yet another mass shooting still managed to find fault with the Biden White House for holding a PR event dedicated to that very thing.

Mental health care should be accessible, but not substantively. Yet. It is still a great way to get a wide range of Americans thinking and talking about it, which is a good step forward.