Patrick Kennedy Breaks Family’s Silence, Opens Up About Their Struggles with

Patrick Kennedy details his dad’s issues with alcohol as well as his own struggles with booze and drugs in “A Common Struggle: A Personal Journey through the Past and Future of Mental Illness and Addiction”, written with Stephen Fried and published by Blue Penguin.

Patrick Kennedy writes candidly about his struggles. He is depicted by a household photograph printed in the novel in his bedroom as a youthful kid showing his aquarium off. Kennedy hopes one day mental illness will be treated with more urgency, similar to how heart disease and cancer are handled.

He says his father spoke with him only once about his 1969 vehicle accident on Chappaquiddick Island that killed his father’s passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne. It occurred as the anniversary approached.

Kennedy defended his portrayal of his father, calling him very loving. “That was it. Then we just walked in silence”.

A lot of the details in the novel are not any surprise.

Patrick describes his low situations through his tries by using dependency and intellectual health problem, as well as upchuck on Air Force One after binge drinking, and getting ceased with an assistant from upsetting himself before engaging throughout the House ground under the effect.

However, the novel includes fascinating windows into his dad made do. Kennedy, for example, wrote a letter to his son when he chose to run for president – to be delivered if he was assassinated. The two went sailing, and also the older Kennedy attempted to pretend everything was great, but kept shaking his head and muttering. So chilly that he made a decision to run for Congress in 1994 without speaking with his dad first. “You’re doing something important, ‘” Kennedy said. He recounts other incidents he attributed to drinking: berating a security guard at the Los Angeles airport and having his girlfriend call the Coast Guard to retrieve her off his boat. Teddy Kennedy accused his children of siding against him, and froze out Patrick for months afterward.

The ideas all sound pretty straightforward, but what is yet to be determined is whether Patrick-no longer a politician-can drive an agenda like that exclusively from his advocacy position.

But not everyone is applauding his candor – the famously clannish Kennedy family is apparently not pleased with the book, particularly its depiction of the author’s parents, Joan Kennedy and the late Sen.