Former Fetterman Aide expressed his concern about the mental health of Senator

The former Staff Chef of Senator John Fetterman, Democrat from Pennsylvania, was so alerted last year with the whimsical behavior of his ex-Boss that he wrote a long letter to his doctor who warned that the senator got out of hand and that his mental health problems could cost him his life.

“I am afraid that if John will stay on his current process, he will not be much longer with us,” wrote Adam Jentleson, the former staff chef, to a doctor who had treated Mr. Fetterman in the National Military Medical Center of Walter.

Mr. Fetterman’s behavior is, according to the former assistants who are still connected to his decreasing circle, sometimes still a concern. Other former members of his staff, who speak on condition of anonymity, report that their colleagues were sometimes afraid of being in the presence of the senator if he was in a reinforced mood.

They have also been warned for a long time never to get in a car like Mr. Fetterman is behind the wheel Because of its dangerous driving habits. Are volatile and concerned behavior, Those assistants noticed last year, it was worseHas only increased since the elections, people said who spent time with him. That has merged with a period in which his politically conservative has become, because he his home state Pennsylvania Swing for Mr. Trump has seen.

“He does not see his doctors,” Mr Jentleson wrote last year to the medical director who supervised his hospitalization from 2023 for mental health problems. “I am not sure when he saw a cardiologist for the last time, but I don’t think he saw one since he was released. He had a long-ago order to stop regular Drop-Bys with Dr. Monahan on his schedule, despite the fact that he had agreed with those who had agreed part of the plan.” Dr. Brian P. Monahan is The Navy Doctor Who has served as a doctor on site in the Capitol for almost 15 years.

The letter from Mr Jentleson, who was obtained by the New York Times, was Reported for the first time by New York Magazine.

Mr. Fetterman said in a statement that “my real doctors and my family have confirmed that I am very good.” He called the article in the New York Magazine 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 were ‘anonymous, dissatisfied staff employees with lies or deformed half values’.

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

A spokesperson for Mr. Fetterman also raised questions about the motivations of Mr Jentleson on Friday to make the public a deep personal letter, given the stigmas that already exist about mental health problems in men.

Mr Jentleson refused to respond.

Mr. Fetterman, the first term senator from Pennsylvania who had an almost fatal stroke during his campaign, spent six weeks in Walter Reed in 2023 who was treated for clinical depression. When he was released, Mr. Fetterman has become a corner to have become. He began to adjust his life in the Senate, to mix it with reporters and colleagues in the corridors, and considered it a unique responsibility to speak out about mental health problems.

“It is a burden, but also a privilege to talk about it,” He told the New York Times in an interview in 2023. “It is also an opportunity to be whole two -part parties. Red or blue, if you have a depression, get help, please. Never do, ever, never harm. Leave no blueprint behind that.”

The auditory processing problems in connection with his stroke also seemed to decrease, and Mr. Fetterman started talking casually with people without trusting audio transcription.

As he has adapted to life as a senator, Mr. Fetterman also became more conservative, usually on Israel, but also on a number of other issues. The senator was the first Democrat that Mr Trump met on his Mar-A-Lago estate after the elections and seemed to think that finding a common land was political Savvy at a time when his state slept further to the right.

An Avid Fox News Watcher, Mr. Fetterman, even considered to vote seriously to confirm Minister of Defense Pete Hegseeth, a former weekend host on ‘Fox & Friends’, according to a former assistant. The mood would have indicated a green light to an appointed cabinet that was confronted with accusations of excessive drinking and abusing women who even made it difficult for Republican senators to find out.

It is not clear to anyone who has worked closely with him that the political transformation of Mr. Fetterman, or his current challenges, is directly related to the crisis in the field of mental health that sent him to the hospital for the first time two years ago. But in his letter, Mr Jentleson describes unstable behavior that, according to him, can result in the fact that the senator would not follow the medical plan, including taking medication for recipe, which are then described by his doctors.

“John pushed everyone away who was supposed to keep him on his recovery plan,” Mr Jentleson wrote in the letter to Dr. David Williamson, the medical director of neuropsychiatry/traumatic brain injury unit rode in Walter. “We don’t know if he is taking his medicines, and his behavior often suggests that he is not.”

He said in the letter that people around Mr. Fetterman were often witnessed of the “warning signals” for which his doctor had warned, including “conspiration thinking, megalomania (for example, he claims to be the most expert source about Israel and Gaza round, but his sources are just the most in the news. Being painful, awkward for everyone in the room.

He said that Mr. Fetterman spent most of his time scrolling on this phone and formulating tweets, and that things were ‘tense’ with his wife, gisele.

“He is concerned with risky behavior. He drives reckless. He also recently bought a gun.” Mr. Jentleson wrote and noted that the purchase of a firearm was a warning signal that he had been dedicated to report to a medical professional.

In a statement to the New York magazine, Gisele Fetterman disputed the claims in the letter from Mr Jentleson and accused him of lying about the condition of her husband.

In recent months, Mrs. Fetterman has presented a united front with her husband. She accompanied him for his visit to Mar-A-Lago after the electionsAnd for a meeting in Israel last month with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Yet many remain delivered to his staff about working for Mr. Fetterman, whose mood can change dramatically overnight. His driving remains an area of ​​special care.

The senator has long been known as a reckless driver and sometimes goes more than 70 miles per hour in a zone of 30 miles per hour. Last year he and his wife, like a 62-year-old woman, were admitted to the hospital after he left the woman’s car on the Eisenhower Memorial Highway in western Maryland.

Mr. Fetterman drove far above the posted speed limit of 70 miles per hour, according to the police report. Pennsylvania Records indicated that Mr. Fetterman had at least two preceding row -violations in the state in which he went above the speed limit more than 20 miles per hour.