“Trauma is not like wine. It doesn’t get better with time,” Jason Kander, President of National Expansion at Veterans Community Project and the host of the Majority 54 podcast, tells New Abnormal co-host Andy Levy on this bonus episode. “It’s more like an avocado, and nobody builds avocado cellars. They don’t keep.”
Kander, former Secretary of State of Missouri, is speaking from experience as an Army veteran-turned-politician whose post-traumatic stress disorder eventually led him to a psychiatric ward at a Veterans’ Affairs hospital. He discusses his experiences in his book, Invisible Storm: A Soldier's Memoir of Politics and PTSD, which he says is, “about somebody who has a secret undiagnosed untreated psychological disorder and is battling it while they happen to be pursuing the presidency.”
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The book also includes this particular psych ward anecdote, which Andy asks Kander to retell.
“The very first time I ever showed up at the VA, I found myself in the suicide hold at the emergency room at the Kansas City VA. And this was at a time when I had decided not to run for president a few months earlier. I was running for mayor in Kansas City instead. And look, everybody in town kind of knew my face by design,” recalls Kander, noting that there was one person who didn’t recognize him.
At first, he was relieved, until he realized the intake person not only didn’t recognize him but didn’t believe he was actually trying to run for president.
“So I say, ‘I don’t know what to tell you, man. I sat for an hour and a half, just me and Obama in his office. And he seemed to think it was a pretty good idea,’” says Kander. “And so this guy kind of sits back, taps his notebook a couple of times, and then he asks me, how often would you say you hear voices?”
Kander also tells Andy about his experience with the VA, which he says has been the “best trauma therapy” he ever had, and what he really hopes people understand about trauma after reading his book.
“It turns out the majority of people who undergo treatment and who commit to the program get to a point where PTSD is not disruptive to their life. I literally didn’t know that. And it’s a big part of why I waited a decade to get help. And I think there’s a lot of people doing the same thing and I need them to know, yeah, post-traumatic growth is a real thing and you can get there,” he says.
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