THURSDAY: Should journalists talk about mental health issues?

THURSDAY, MAY 8, 2025

The New York Times just did: Should journalists talk about "mental health?" Should they talk about "mental illness?"

As we've long noted, a prohibition against such talk exists with respect to the mental health (or mental illness) of public officials. Major news orgs will routinely refer to "mental illness" when discussing certain types of "street crime," but they'll never discuss any such topics with respect to political figures.

Having said that, we'll also say this—the New York Times just rewrote that rule! The report in question appears online beneath this dual headline:

Former Fetterman Aide Expressed Concern to Doctor About Senator’s Mental Health
The former chief of staff to Senator John Fetterman last year wrote to a doctor who had treated him, pointing to “warning signs” that suggested the senator could be backsliding on his recovery from a mental health crisis.

The report discusses some deeply serious mental health concerns. Allegedly, they constitute a "mental health crisis." The report begins as shown:

Former Fetterman Aide Expressed Concern to Doctor About Senator’s Mental Health

The former chief of staff to Senator John Fetterman, Democrat of Pennsylvania, was so alarmed with his ex-boss’s erratic behavior last year that he wrote a lengthy letter to his doctor warning that the senator was spiraling out of control and that his mental health issues could cost him his life.

“I’m worried that if John stays on his current trajectory he won’t be with us for much longer,” Adam Jentleson, the former chief of staff, wrote on May 20 to a doctor who had treated Mr. Fetterman at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

Mr. Fetterman’s behavior, according to former aides who are still connected to his diminishing circle, is still at times a cause of concern. Other former members of his staff, speaking on the condition of anonymity, report that their colleagues sometimes were frightened to be in the senator’s presence, if he was in an amped-up mood.

They have also long been warned never to get in a car if Mr. Fetterman is behind the wheel because of his dangerous driving habits. His volatile and concerning behavior, which aides noticed last year was taking a turn for the worse, has only increased since the election, people who have spent time with him said...

[...]

Mr. Jentleson’s letter, which was obtained by The New York Times, was first reported by New York magazine.

So reported the New York Times, describing the contents of the letter by the former chief of staff. Senator Fetterman and a spokesperson disputed the statements made in the letter:

Mr. Fetterman said in a statement that “my ACTUAL doctors and my family affirmed that I’m very well.” He called the New York magazine article a “hit piece” and suggested that Mr. Jentleson and the author of the article, Ben Terris, were “best friends” with a joint ax to grind, and that they “sourced anonymous, disgruntled staffers with lies or distorted half-truths.”

(Mr. Terris revealed in his article that Mr. Jentleson is a personal friend.)

A spokesperson for Mr. Fetterman also raised questions on Friday about Mr. Jentleson’s motivations for making public a deeply personal letter, given the stigmas that already exist around mental health issues among men.

As for the Times, its report does not contain the term "mental illness." It does refer to "mental health" and to "mental health concerns" again and again and again. 

The "mental health crisis" to which it refers was Senator Fetterman's six-week hospitalization for clinical depression in 2023.

Should the New York Times be reporting such things? Even here in our flailing world, we'd say that it certainly should.

For starters, most people seem to agree that "mental health issues" actually do exist. Serious mental health issues—clinical depression would be an example—may involve a tragic loss of human potential and capability, just as serious physical illness can.

(If it's true that "stigmas already exist around mental health issues among men," we would have thought that most people had come to an agreement—the best way to address some such stigma is by creating a world in which the stigmatization of such concerns is viewed as a thing of the past.)

Is Senator Fetterman dealing with serious "mental health concerns?" We have no way of knowing. We're trying to sketch the geography of modern journalistic behavior, in which "mental illness" is freely discussed with respect to one class of people, but has been aggressively hidden away with respect to another.

In our view, the existence of serious mental health issues calls for sympathy and concern. The new rule concerning discussion of such issues would now seem to be this:

For regular people and even for senators, yes! For even higher public officials, absolutely not!

Why do we think we can see some such rule? Here is another passage from the Times report:

“John has pushed out everyone who was supposed to help keep him on his recovery plan,” Mr. Jentleson wrote in the letter to Dr. David Williamson, the medical director of the neuropsychiatry/traumatic brain injury unit at Walter Reed. “We do not know if he is taking his meds, and his behavior frequently suggests he is not.”

He said in the letter that people around Mr. Fetterman often witnessed the “warning signs” his doctor had warned of, including “conspiratorial thinking, megalomania (for example, he claims to be the most knowledgeable source on Israel and Gaza around but his sources are just what he reads in the news—he declines most briefings and never reads memos); high highs and low lows; long, rambling, repetitive and self-centered monologues lying in ways that are painfully, awkwardly obvious to everyone in the room.”

Those "warning signs" sound very familiar at this point in time! New rule:

When such signs appear in a senator, they can now be discussed.