Kennedy's message: 'Break the Silence'

The message comes from personal and family experience, of coping with bipolar disorder and addiction, of moving in and out of rehab, and finally, at last, remaining sober these last five years.

"Break the silence," Patrick J. Kennedy said Monday as he prepared to give a speech presented by the Medical Society of Milwaukee County.

Younger son of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy and ex-congressman from Rhode Island, Kennedy, 49, has entered a new stage of his very public life, advocating for effective mental health care.

To be an effective advocate, Kennedy has gone deep into his life story, one that he has shared in speeches across the country and in a book he co-authored with Stephen Fried and now out in paperback, "A Common Struggle."

Kennedy didn't just detail his own problems with mental illness and abusing prescription drugs and alcohol. He also wrote of his parents' problems with alcohol.

"The common struggle for me was the silence in my family," he said. "My mother (Joan) would walk around our house, we wouldn't talk about it. She was suffering acutely. Same thing with my dad. In my own life, everyone walked on egg shells around me. No one would tell me the truth."

"The key is, we have this epidemic going on around us. People dying by the droves. Why? The one thing we can change in our own lives with our co-workers, with our friends and families, we can start to become a resource, we can become more knowledgeable," he said.

People can make a difference in the lives of others, he said. And they can advocate for getting more resources into the community to deal with mental illness and the crisis of addiction.

He wants to leave people with an "uplifting message," he said, even when "tragedy and sorrow" appear so frequently.

"There's a new day coming and it's an exciting day," he said, hoping to spark great change through the Kennedy Forum, which seeks to "revolutionize the way mental health care is delivered in America and create a future where diagnosis and treatment covers the brain and the body."

Still, breaking the silence in his family was controversial and Kennedy admits that not all wounds have healed.

"That only illustrates the point, this is not easy," he said.

Kennedy isn't easy on himself. In his book, he writes of the aftermath of a May 2006 crash when he "slammed my green Mustang into the police barrier in front of the U.S. Capitol."

He was forced to come to grips with his problems, writing, "I was an alcoholic; I was a drug addict; I had bipolar disorder and anxiety disorder, and I hadn't been properly treating any of them."

Recovery would be long, hard and not without relapse. After serving eight terms, he retired from Congress after the 2010 elections.

Much has happened to him over the past few years. He now makes his home on the New Jersey Shore where he lives with his wife, Amy, (they married in 2011) and their four children. He is healthier after the accumulation of such good things, and going to 12-step recovery every day.

Kennedy counts his sobriety from Feb. 22, 2011, the longest period of continuous sobriety in his life.

"The big change in my life is I have a permanent sobriety date and I count my days," he said. "That's a big difference from the past. I always held out the reservation well some days if it got tough enough I'd go back and be a kind of safety valve for the stresses of life. Now, I have a family, I have a recovery support group and while I still travel and have a busy life, I don't have incessant challenges of being in the limelight as an elected official. I'm still in the limelight, but it's not the same."