John Fetterman admits he welcomed death during a six-week hospital stay for depression – and reveals he recorded a farewell message for his children when he had a stroke

Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman admitted he welcomed death during his six-week hospitalization for depression and revealed he recorded a farewell message to his children after suffering a stroke last spring.

Fetterman was profiled for a cover story for Time magazine this month and said it was his debate against Republican Senate hopeful Mehmet Oz that led to his depressive episode.

During the debate in late October, Fetterman showed himself garbled several answers and gave a nonsensical answer about fracking — putting the after-effects of the stroke he suffered in May on national display while competing in the most-watched U.S. Senate race of 2022 -cycle.

The debate set the tone. Excuse me — that should be lit,” he told Time’s Molly Ball. “Light the match,” he said on the third attempt.

The senator still suffers from auditory processing problems 14 months after the stroke.

Pennsylvania Senate hopeful John Fetterman struggled on some issues to get through his hour-long debate with Republican Dr. Mehmet Oz at the end of October – as the after-effects of his stroke were fully visible in May. He points to the episode as a breaking point for his depression

While the debate against Oz was a breaking point, the January suicide of New York Times journalist Blake Hounshell — who knew Fetterman personally — hit Fetterman hard and contributed to his decision to seek help.

Hounshell, 44, is survived by a wife and two children.

Those closest to Fetterman always felt there was a darkness to him, Ball wrote.

“He’d say, ‘I’m not too sad, you’re too happy.’ He was just very empathetic, I think, and he bore the pain of so many. I thought of him as melancholic – I’ve always loved Abraham Lincoln, and historians called him melancholy, which we later learned was actually clinical depression. And I thought, oh, he’s my Abraham Lincoln. It wasn’t something I wanted to change about him,” his wife Gisele Barreto Fetterman told the magazine.

Just days before the Democratic primary, Fetterman encountered his first major challenge in a year: the stroke.

On the campaign trail near Lancaster, Gisele noticed her husband’s face was sinking in and immediately rushed him to a hospital.

He easily won the Democratic primary and spent the day of his victory sedated, wearing a pacemaker.

Time reported that Fetterman recorded a video message for his children — Karl, 14, Grace, 11, and August, 9 — in case he passed away.

Fetterman spent most of the summer off the campaign trail recovering from the stroke.

By August, however, he had returned and was able to pass a standard stump speech, making some mistakes, but the debate was the event that really showed how much progress he still had to make to fully recover from a stroke.

Despite the debate performance, Fetterman beat Oz, the Trump-backed TV doctor, by five points.

Fetterman (left) and his wife, Gisele Barreto Fetterman (right) during treatment for depression at Walter Reed in March

John and Gisele Fetterman leave their polling place in Braddock, Pennsylvania on Election Day 2022

His victory was announced around 1 a.m. on election night.

Thinking it would take days to count the votes, Time reported that Fetterman had no victory speech ready.

“We launched this campaign almost two years ago — and we had our slogan — and it’s on every one of those signs now: every county, every vote,” Fetterman told a rowdy crowd still gathering at Stage AE in Pittsburgh. And that’s exactly what happened – we blocked them. We held the line.’

“I never expected to turn these red counties blue, but we did what we had to do,” he continued.

“And that’s why tonight I’m the next US senator from Pennsylvania,” Fetterman added.

After the race ended, the depression really subsided.

Fetterman recalled feeling lethargic when he went to freshman orientation, as Gisele forced him to go.

“Think of the madness of that,” he said. ‘I’ve been working for two years. And at the end of that, after nearly dying, after the most infamous debate in American politics, I wouldn’t show up for orientation.”

“That’s what depression does,” he added.

Fetterman said he was not actively thinking about suicide, but would have welcomed the death.

“I didn’t think I could be fixed,” he said. “If the doctor had said, oh, by the way, you’ve got six months left, I was like, okay, whatever,” the Pennsylvania legislator said. “It was that gloomy.”

He told Time that he was lucky to have survived.

He was diagnosed with depression by Congressional attending physician Brian Monahan after being hospitalized in February for what he thought could be another stroke.

Monahan recommended impatient treatment to Walter Reed.

Staff and family members gave him an “intervention,” Fetterman said, until he agreed to undergo treatment.

“I’ll always remember walking up to his car parked a block away and thinking, ‘Please don’t change your mind,'” recalls associate Adam Jentleson. “He’s a big man, and if he decided he didn’t want to go, there was nothing me and Bobby could do about it,” Jentleson said, referring to another Fetterman staffer, Bobby Maggio.

Time reported that Fetterman got worse before he got better.

‘His normally bare head went hazy; his fingernails were like claws; he didn’t get out of his pajamas. When he saw his face in the mirror, he did not recognize himself. He was consumed with self-loathing, convinced that his own family wanted nothing to do with him,” Ball wrote.

Doctors dug deep into Fetterman’s health and realized he was hard of hearing, which made things more difficult as he recovered from the stroke, so he got hearing aids.

He had lost so much weight that the dosage of his heart medicine was too high.

With medication, Fetterman improved — and his doctor now considers his depression to be in remission.

My message is, I don’t care if you’re a Trumper, a MAGA, or a hard leftist, or anyone in between. Depression runs across the spectrum, and get help for it,” Fetterman told Time. “It’s not a Democratic senator from Pennsylvania saying this. No, I’m just a husband and a father, someone who suffered from depression and got help…before it was too late.”

“In the old days, some things had — damage that can’t be undone. And I would beg everyone to get help. Because it can work. It worked. And I am so grateful,” he added.