John Fetterman: The shocking story of his transformation. Does anyone truly know him?

I heard a lot of people talking about the “All By Himself” piece from the New York Intelligencer today. It made me curious enough to purchase a subscription so I could read it myself. The remarks that it’s a “sad story” are an understatement. I found myself wanting to find him and give him a long hug (In reality I would be shot by his security detail, but it’s the thought that counts. Right?). John Fetterman is someone I have been interested in since before he ran for U.S. Senate against Dr. Mehmet Oz.

I’m a lifelong Pennsylvania resident and I remember seeing him for the first time on CNN or MSNBC talking about Donald Trump’s obsessive delusion that he had won the 2020 election “in a landslide.”John Fetterman was the Lt. Governor of Pennsylvania at the time and I remember thinking that he was the most “human-like” politician I’d ever seen.

He came across as comfortable enough in his own skin to say what he thought in an authentic, blunt fashion. If I hadn’t known who he was, I never would have guessed he was a politician.

John Fetterman was the type of Democrat the voters wanted. Someone down-to-earth who lives among the average American worker and isn’t afraid to “punch sideways” and attack Republicans. He was the kind of guy you’d love to sit next to at the bar and shoot the sh*t with over a beer.

That’s why I was excited to find out he was running for a seat in the U.S. Senate. During his campaign, he knew exactly how to attack Oz in a way that would resonate with voters. His response to the daytime talk show host’s commercial filmed in a grocery store, where he comments on the high price of crudité, was gold.

In the comment section of a Washington Post article about the doctor treating John Fetterman writing a letter to Congress during the Senate race, a reader wrote about Dr. Mehmet Oz:

Am I the only person who had never heard that word (crudité) in my lifetime until that moment? It made Dr. Oz look like a rich elitist who definitely hadn’t lost any sleep over the price of groceries. In fact, that was probably the first time he’d ever been inside a grocery store—walking among the “peasants” of PA. Kind of like another billionaire we know:

I supported John Fetterman throughout his campaign. I can’t recall if he ever labeled himself one, but he was labeled a progressive populist by the media and some of the voters. Likely because we desperately needed (and still do) more progressives in Congress. He spoke about economic populist policies and connected with the working class the way the Democratic Party did in the past.

When John Fetterman suffered a near-fatal stroke during his campaign, I related to that as well. I suffered a stroke in 2016 that paralyzed my left side and affected my ability to think and speak. Thankfully, the speech and mental issues cleared up within a month with daily speech therapy.

After John Fetterman won the Senate seat, there was an increased focus by the press on the issues caused by the stroke. It was sad to see people attacking or mocking him for things that were beyond his control. It’s not surprising that he ended up going to Walter Reed for 6 weeks for clinical depression and thoughts of harming himself.

In the Intelligencer piece, the reporter talked out the reactions from his staff to his hospitalization and comments about him “acting like himself again.

His staff was praising him for being transparent about his mental health issues and setting a good example for young men by getting help. Here is an excerpt from All by Himself where the reporter talks about the events leading up to the hospitalization of John Fetterman:

A staffer recalled getting a text from a person at the retreat [celebrating Fetterman’s win] asking if their boss was okay. Fetterman was sitting at a table by himself, slowly sipping a Coke and refusing to talk with anybody.

Later that day, another staffer heard an alarming report from a journalist: Fetterman had just walked, obliviously, into the road and was nearly struck by a car.

An aide found Fetterman wandering on Capitol Hill a short time later. Worried that he had suffered another stroke, the staffer whisked him to George Washington University Hospital. Doctors there determined there had been no new stroke and that the “dizziness and confusion” he’d experienced was partly owed to severe dehydration. Fetterman also consulted with a psychiatrist there and, according to someone briefed by doctors, was prescribed medications for depression.

Doctors discharged Fetterman, and his team told the press that he had been briefly hospitalized after “feeling lightheaded while attending a Democratic retreat.”

A week later, Democratic Ohio senator Sherrod Brown came to pay Fetterman a visit in his new Capitol Hill office. They seemed destined to get along: Each hailed from purplish-red states and exuded an Everyman energy more likely to be found in union halls than in the halls of Congress. But their meeting went awry.

Brown tried his best to get a conversation going, but according to two people present, Fetterman was virtually “catatonic.” He could barely string two sentences together, talking so quietly that everyone in the room had to strain to hear him. Fetterman then stood up and began walking around the office in tight loops, a move the two staffers described as doing “figure eights.”

After Brown left, Fetterman paced from one room inside his office complex to another and back again. At one point, one of his aides said, he walked into the hallway peering over his shoulder, as if he were being followed by shadowy figures.

The staff got in touch with a Senate physician, and everyone agreed: Fetterman needed to get to Walter Reed. He was admitted on February 15.

I’m not a doctor, psychiatrist, psychologist, or therapist, so this is just an observation of mine: I wonder if his depression was a misdiagnosis and it’s actually something like Schizophrenia or Bipolar disorder (commonly called Manic Depressive Disorder).

A lot of the symptoms described in this piece just sound like more than deptession and dehydration to me. But again, I’m not a doctor.

His chief of staff at the time, Adam Jentleson, became so concerned about Fetterman that he wrote a letter to his doctor listing all of the signs and symptoms he and staff had noticed and they were unable to get him to see even the Capitol doctor. I’m going to share part of the article describing that letter because it’s where a lot of the issues were mentioned that caused me to question if it could be more than depression that he was suffering with.

Stopping medication because you “feel better” is very common among people with schizophrenia, too. That’s one reason you see so many people diagnosed with it living on the street. I have Major Depressive Disorder and after getting better on the medications, the last thing I thought about was stopping them.

Patients dealing with depression typically don’t just stop taking them when they improve. At least, that’s been my own personal experience in life (See my earlier caveat).

Now Former Chief of Staff’s letter to the doctor treating John Fetterman

From the NewYork Intelligencer:

“…a year after his release from the hospital, Fetterman’s behavior had so alarmed Jentleson that he resigned his position. In May 2024, he wrote an urgent letter to David Williamson, the medical director of the traumatic-brain-injury and neuropsychiatry unit at Walter Reed, who had overseen Fetterman’s care at the hospital.

“I think John is on a bad trajectory and I’m really worried about him,” the email began. If things didn’t change, Jentleson continued, he was concerned Fetterman “won’t be with us for much longer.”

His 1,600-word email came with the subject line “concerns,” and it contained a list of them, from the seemingly mundane (“He eats fast food multiple times a day”) to the scary (“We do not know if he is taking his meds and his behavior frequently suggests he is not”).

“We often see the kind of warning signs we discussed,” Jentleson wrote. “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.”

Fetterman was, according to Jentleson, avoiding the regular checkups advised by his doctors. He was preoccupied with the social-media platform X, which he’d previously admitted had been a major “accelerant” of his depression. He drove his car so “recklessly,” Jentleson said, that staff refused to ride with him.

He had also bought a gun. “He says he has a biometric safe and takes all the necessary precautions, and living where he does I understand the desire for personal protection,” Jentleson wrote, referring to Fetterman’s rough-and-tumble town of Braddock, Pennsylvania. “But this is one of the things you said to flag, so I am flagging.”

Another red flag, Jentleson added: “Every person who was supposed to help him stay on his recovery plan has been pushed out.” Fetterman was isolated, had “damaged personal relationships,” and was shedding staff. The turmoil in his office continued over the following year. Since winning the election in 2022, he has lost his closest advisers, including three of his top spokespeople, his legislative director, and Jentleson.

His circle of trust has shrunk, and people I spoke with made it clear that they expect more staffers to depart.”

When the Senator started shifting to the Right and acting like the biggest cheerleader for Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians, people began circulating theories about why he had changed. The most common theory was “he had lied about who he was during the campaign.” I don’t believe that for two reasons; if you’re trying to win an election in Pennsylvania, the last thing you’d do is pretend to be progressive.

As I said at the beginning of this article, I’ve been paying attention to him since he was the Lt. Governor of my state and he’s always been the man he was during the campaign.

My personal theories are that he either got corrupted by the money in Congress (though it happened so fast) or, more likely, his personality and behavior were affected by the stroke, or perhaps the damage to his brain caused by the stroke triggered mental illness, which has resulted in his delusions and personality changes. My personality and behavior changed after my stroke in 2016, but only in minor ways.

Since the stroke caused an area on the right side of my brain to die, I was paralyzed on the left side. (There was also an area on the back of my brain but not sure what that area controlled.)

Either way, I feel horrible for John Fetterman, his wife and kids, and the staffers working around him. It must be so difficult to watch someone you care about change in different ways to the point that you ask—as his wife did—“Where is the man I married?” I’ll end with the final paragraph in the Intelligencer article.

This part comes after the reporter had been narrating his experience going to the home of John Fetterman to interview him, and he asked a question that seemed to upset the Senator to the point that his mood abruptly changed. He finally asked Fetterman if something he had said upset him:

“For the first time since I had returned to his office, he looked right at me. “No, everything’s great,” he said, deadpan. “Everything’s great. I don’t know what you’re referencing.””