Patrick Kennedy Plus One: Building a New Kennedy Legacy Through Mental Health

a leader as some profile encouraged. I reacted to a situation where the fellow that I had been in drug rehab with had sold his story of being in rehab with the Kennedy to the National Inquirer, and so I had to see my own face on the cover of the National Choir with the headlines Patrick Kennedy drug addict and this is going into my second term in public office. Of course, I thought my political career was over.

telling the truth out loud. It's a rare, honest look at what it means to carry both pain and purpose and keep showing up for the people you love. Today, we're bringing you a conversation straight from the Lake Nna Impact Form at the KPMG's Learning an Innovation Center's Lake House in Orlando's Lake Nona Community, a place where the brightest minds come together to shape the future of health, wellness and medical innovation.

sixteen years. He was the driving force behind the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act that required health insurance companies to provide coverage for mental illness and addiction treatment, just as they would for other illnesses. Together with his wife Amy, they founded the Kennedy Forum to ensure that mental health is an essential part of our healthcare system and to continue to break the stigma around mental health. As our listeners know, what makes my legacy unique is

we don't just hear from extraordinary individuals. We hear from the people who know them best, those who have been with them on their life journey, Patrick, would you please do us the honor of introducing to us your wife Amy?

When she came up, she says, I just need to do this for my father because he loves your family. And I thought, oh my god, it's guy who thought I was going to be in good shape. But Amy, a public school teacher, ran for Congress a couple of years ago and tracked the attention of our Governor Murphy and New Jersey such that he put her in charge of the National Governor's Association effort to define the solutions to helping address children's mental health. She's co founder of

the Kennedy Forum. And of course, if you're talking about mental health prevention, prevention, prevention, so she's led that effort. We wouldn't have such a big crisis in this country if we did a better job at earlier intervention. And as a public school teacher, she's been on the front lines of seeing these challenges.

into working on such a critical issue. And as I sit here with an extraordinary couple who have come together an iconic family, a school teacher dedicated towards mental health, I look at both of you, co creating and co leading this institution, and I can't help but think of another iconic family where an individual came from her own activism roots and married in and the two of them co leading and co creating their own passion on civil rights.

We know Martin's name, we know Patrick's name. But I love in both your interactions that you called out all that you do and the extraordinary work that you do is with your life partners. I love the tributes because Martin you have said that Andrea is the driving force behind a lot of your action, and Patrick, I love that you just said Amy is the driving force behind a lot of your action. It was just lovely to hear it.

world that works for all of us. And when you have those connections from the work that your father did with his uncle to uncles actually coming to the house after the assassination and One of the things I think a lot of people also don't realize is that after RFK was assassinated, if I'm correct, your mother rode home on a plane with it was Jackie Kennedy, elf the Kennedy together, this generation, I mean Martin, he paged for your father, campaigned for you, Amy, and we just you know,

we raise our children together. We both have sixteen year olds. We you know, we see each other. You know, ever we hug each other, and so it's like family.

kind of felt like got a front row seat. It reduced the kind of fear and the hesitancy to be active because we had such great morale models to show us what activism meant.

Patrick left Congress and that had been his life. He also that was the year that his dad had just passed, and I think he was a little bit kind of looking for roots, and even though he has this really big family, to be able to kind of scale it down to something that was in its simplest forms, being able to come be part of my family, which has just been really centered in South Jersey for you know, generations,

and we're tight knit, small school teacher family. One Christmas he came and then he never left, and it was, yeah, it was, you know, wonderful for our family, but also I think really helped him kind of reset for a life after DC that was going to be centered around his own family. And for our kids, you know, there's

really cool things that they get to do. But then there's also a little bit of my mom that you know, comes into play where I'm saying, don't throw that out, we need to you can eat that, you know, whatever it is. That tailor's it back down to a different level. And he always says, I swear your parents are still living in the Great Depression. Why I use your mom saving that tenfoil? You know, I was like, well, you'll say, we're teaching the kids something.

work that you do through the Kennedy Forum. And so as I sit here with the two of you, I love the fact that you have busted through stigma in such a powerful way and through politics. But since we're talking about, you know, all my legacy origin stories, I got to go all the way back to the origin because when I look at the courage. It took at a very young age, Patrick, to be open, you know,

to battle addiction, bipolar disorder, rehabit eighteen. Yeah, can you take us back to how that moment in your life and frankly, how formative it was for you sitting here today.

you know, wrote about profiles and courage. I reacted to a situation where the fellow I had been in drug rehab with had sold his story of being in rehab with the Kennedy to the National Inquirer, And so I had to see my own face on the cover of the National Choir with the headlines Patrick Kennedy drug addict and this is my going into my second term in public office. Of course, I thought my political career was over. This was back in nineteen ninety one when these were

really big issues. Of course, today nothing knocks you out of the box because everything's fair game, but my constituency was really something. They really didn't like what had happened to me, and so they I was reelected. When I got to Washington, I could sponsor all this mental health legislation, including the one that I kind of became known for, which is the Mental Health Parody and Addiction Equedact. And

I was the first name on that bill. I was the youngest member of Congress from the smallest state in the country, and yet I got to put my name number one on a bill that simply said that we had to treat the brain like any other organ of the body and have insurance coverage cover all the illnesses. Nobody wanted to be champion of the And if you had a bill with the title though had the words mental in it and addiction, I mean what politician wants

to be the primary sponsor that? Because, of course the next question is, well, do you have a mental health issue or addiction issue? And no one wants to answer that, because of course we all do, and so they don't want to go down that rabbit hole. But for me, since this guy kind of rated on me. I was thrown out there and it ended up being one of the greatest things that ever happened in my life. So God works in mysterious ways, you.

that is we will support. Now we know your uncle Bobby and Jack fought for civil rights, and your whole family, and of course, as you mentioned, your aunt starting special Olympics. And your dad holds a special place in my heart because one of the reasons I ran for office was because of my serving as his page and seeing how laws were made. So I was inspired by his leadership throughout his life, as so many were as he became the lion of the Senate.

meals with him throughout the week. We'd always do lunch together, and so I had a chance to actually have a really different relationship beside kind of father son. It was kind of colleague, and I'm just so glad I had that, because you know, if you're a son with such an enormous figure as a father, it can be pretty intimidating. And it not that it wasn't, but I felt enormously blessed to have had the chance to actually be successful

in his domain of political life. As you know, these people that were so impacted by our father's lives, you know, I got a front row seat to hearing how their lives were transformed by that service. So in a sense, my uncles never got to hear about how much they inspired and made a difference in people's lives. So I had lots of positive reinforcement. You know, these days when you think about politicians is just so negative and you know, depressing.

It's wondering anybody runs for office. But when I was growing up, it was joyful, it was fun, it was interesting, and so that's why I feel so blessed to have been part of it.

a lot of people struggle without understanding diagnosis. So can you help us understand a little bit of what was your own personal journey, to understand what you were experiencing with the lens that that might help some of the listeners who are searching on their own journey.

so there was that. And then self medicating with alcohol and drugs was a way I used to manage those symptoms. Ironically, I had the best psychiatrists in the world, but they

didn't often get the training and addiction. So I had great psychiatrists, but you know, most clinician physical doctors oncology, heart disease, diabetes, none of them get any training on mental health and addiction, which if you're going to treat your patients and you're an oncologist, being just diagnosing your patient with cancer and you don't know how to treat

anxiety and depression, you're not doing your job. You're a heart doctrin and you don't know that if underlying depressions can increase your patient's chance for fatal heart type by four times, if you're treating a diabetic and we know how big that issue, and you're not addressing alcoholism. So these are relevant issues because we think of them again as isolation, but we have to think of the whole person.

So what I want in the future is when people go to these other doctors as part of the health for those illnesses. Mental health is part of it as opposed to seeing, as I said again separate from the system, which it gets pushed to the margins because it's not

paid for rankly. And the parity law that I've been working on, I've been trying to get the insurance companies to comply with it, and I will say it's really important for them to have transparency so we know what the access is to diabetic care as opposed to depression, anxiety or addiction care. There is enormous disparity, which means people have to pay more for those health care services because they're not accessible, they're out of network. Insurance companies

have kind of ghost networks. What we're doing here at Lake Nona, and we have KPMG as one of our big partners, is showing the cost to the whole life of the person, not just their other medical costs, but the impact on their work world, how they're less engaged, what they call presenteeism where they're there but they're not really there, or absenteeism. You know, we've never fully managed to understand the full impact of mental health and addiction.

I have just celebrated my fourteenth year of continuous sobriety. I didn't get sober until I was forty two. I was in and out of hospitals throughout my time in Congress, and most of them were obviously all anonymous. I made a big point, even though I'm the champion of anti stigma, to not say that I'm going in there, because I still felt the stigma. It's still very alive and well.

So I went to the Mayo Clinic rather than Hazelton for my drug treatment because I thought if I went to the Mayo Clinic, people might think I had a real illness, you know, and that's when the height of my you know, work on parody. So this is very still, very stigmatized, and you know the best way to change that is to normalize mental health as part of overall health.

we have the opioid, we have the I'll call you. So, we have the people who have families of overdose, who families of suicide, schizophrenia. We're all siloed and yet all of our issues benefit from ninety eight percent of the same things. But as a community, we don't look at each other as part of the greater whole, and so we exacerbate our own advocacy efforts. Being so anemic and

we don't put the lights on the board. In terms of our voter power, I mean, if you think about it, you know the old Godfather movie, we're bigger than us steel Like, we are the biggest special interest group in the country that has no power, and so we need to be organized. If you ask me what's one of the biggest things we could do for our movement, it's just to organize the advocacy community, to get the vote out, to have an agenda where when people got elected they

know what they were voting for. Now we have politicians telling us, oh, I have lived experience or I did this, but we need to know what their positions are on the big issues so we can hold them accountable and if they're not doing what needs to be done, we vote for someone who will. And if they know that we're as big and as widespread as we are, they're going to pay attention to us. So it's the old you know, political power is really going to determine what

kind of system we have. And the reason we haven't made the pushback is stigma's still live. As person in recovery, I can say I'm in twelve step recovery that doesn't violate what's known as the eleventh tradition in twelve step recovery to be anonymous, because I haven't told you what program I'm in, But a lot of people in twelve step recovery think that they're not supposed to be public. We have twenty eight million Americans in long term recovery.

No one knows who they are because they're living in church basements and they're anonymous. When I came back from rehab in Congress, I was amazed to how many of my colleagues had lived experience. Of course, none of them knew each other. They all knew me because I was all over the headlines, and so they all told me who they were, but none of them knew who each other were. And you know, you're not going to get this political power unless you organize, and that's something we really need to do.

And yet this is where students need to be able to get the care to have the not only the academic success that's going to change their trajectory on their emotional wellbeing. But if we don't do these interventions and we have to wait for a diagnosis, they'll wait ten years for a diagnosis and during that time it metastasizes. So we have to be able to get in early.

We need to make schools where they're spending the majority of their day a place where they can access these services, and that's not going to be through the school guidance counselor. School guidance counselor is an essential part of the ecosystem for providing care and helping to identify students that need help. But you have to have licensed clinicians that are coming in and providing the service or be able to refer

out to a community partner. And once they've set up that full continuum of care that can begin with school or can begin in the pediatrician's office with screening, Let's make sure that that can follow them throughout their life course and they can move in and out of that regardless of whether or not there's a diagnosis. We need to treat the symptoms that are impacting their daily life.

It can be very hard, you know, you want to share tasks equally, and so if Patrick is going to a meeting at noon instead of you know, helping me with something that I need, that's because that's his health and he has to do that. And I wouldn't begrudge him going for radiation or going to do some other thing.

But if his workout really is an essential part of his well being, you know, he goes on that treadmill because it helps his brain and it's boosting his endorphins, and he's going to a twelve step meeting because that's important to him, then we have to prioritize that and make sure that there's a workaround. But he's also very flexible. You know, he's doing this, he's we're in line at something. He's got his twelve step meeting on his phone and he's listening to it as we stand in line. So

he's trying to balance many things too. But I would just say, especially in the first year, there's a lot that has to be really prioritized around that person and their wellness. So I am also I've been sober for more than fourteen years because I'm supporting Patrick, and how much easier is that journey for him if he has a partner who is with him in that. We're going to events all the time, and you know, we're going

home together. So let's let's both be in the same page, and we might at the same time go, Okay, I think we better roll because they're getting they're getting a little more fired up than than we are. So let's go together. And so having that kind of understanding of where we are comfortable and bedtime, all those things. We never underestimate how important sleep is in this whole process.

which means you've got to do homework. Whoever knew that therapy was just talking to someone you know every other week for forty minutes. No, No, that's just the check in. The Real work is what happens between therapy visits. And here are the homework assignments where you can measure how you're changing your thinking based upon how you're actually changing your actions. So long story short, we have a deficit

of literacy in this whole space. We have to educate everybody about what it really represents so that it's not this mysterious thing.

own mental health. And the reason I want to shout out to that also is because Patrick, you've talked about how it really wasn't easy to share your story when you spoke out, even family members you said were pushed back candidly at the time, And can you help us understand why do you think that was and also why was it so important for you to push beyond that yourself to be so open.

a reveal. For my story, it was not a reveal, but my family still thought it felt like a reveal. Because growing up in a political family, people would attack my family based upon experiences with alcoholism and addiction and so forth, and so it became a very sensitive subject. And of course these attacks were predicated on the idea that there was some sign of moral failing. Right, no one could if you wanted to look up post traumatic

stress in the dictionary. You know, one of the examples would be my dad, you know, lost to his brothers to assassination. Many Trump events. We're just starting to learn about all of this stuff. This is no one, as Amy says with about her students, gets up and acts out. They just don't have the tools to know how to manage their emotions their feelings. In my journey as an advocate, I got a chance to rededicate the John F. Kennedy's Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where they

train all the Green Berets. And they told me there because they saw that I was a mental health guy. They said, mister Kennedy, we have more mental health for our Green Berets than any other branch of the Service. And I said to myself, these Green Berets don't need mental health. They're so strong. They jump out of airplanes, they swim under the water for five miles without breathing, you know, they hit the beach, they speak six languages, they take out their target, they're reading to their kids

by dinner time. I mean, these these people don't And he said, no, no, we look at mental health as a four multiplier. And I love that because what it basically says, if the Green Berets, who are the sharpest, strongest, they all invest in their own mental health. Why because if they're on a mission, they have to. They can't have any intrusive thoughts. So one of the things that characterizes illnesses is you kind of have the inability to

have insight. For one, that's the common characteristic. You don't know how bad you really are, but you also have these intrusive thoughts, and the Green Berets just they train on how to mitigate that, because if you have an intrusive thought when you're supposed to have eyes on your six, you know, your teammates and a mission, it could be

the difference between life or death. But I love the idea that we all could maximize our own mental health because that way we make it something that everybody can do better by.

Nona community. We're so grateful for you living your legacy every single day and for showing us what change is possible when we come together.

Lisa Lyle. Listen on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time, may you find inspiration to live your legacy.