When mental health becomes a political identity

As a rising young Democratic star and top elected official of Harris County, the most populous in Texas, Lina Hidalgo surprised many people last summer when she announced that she had checked herself into a residential mental health clinic for severe depression.

She had been struggling privately for years, even as she stepped forward assertively to lead Houston's response to the coronavirus pandemic and help residents across the county cope with flooding and a devastating winter freeze.

Then, during a brutal 2022 re-election fight, her mental state deteriorated. Aides were aware that something was wrong — there were missed campaign events and staff shortages — but few knew how dire things had become.

“I remember feeling really suicidal and saying to David, my boyfriend and my therapist at the time, 'We have to do something,'” Ms. Hidalgo said.

Since returning from nearly two months of treatment at the clinic, Ms. Hidalgo has spoken openly and often about her mental health, making her struggle an increasingly important part of her political identity.

In a wide-ranging interview with The New York Times, she spoke candidly about her depression, her decision to seek treatment and the trauma of childhood sexual abuse that she has rarely spoken about.

“The more we talk about it, the more it will help someone else,” she said.

Ms. Hidalgo, 32, has added her name to a growing list of politicians — most of them Democrats — who have chosen to be public about their mental health. She has benefited from this openness herself, she said, inspired by Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, who announced that he was receiving inpatient treatment for depression just months before Ms. Hidalgo sought that kind of care.

But the approach remains politically risky. Political consultants still point to Sen. Thomas Eagleton, a Missouri Democrat whose history of mental health treatment doomed his prospects as vice presidential running mate in 1972. And while the number of politicians willing to discuss their mental health treatment has increased, it remains small.

“They feel like once you have that scarlet letter, people will always look sideways at you,” said Patrick Kennedy, a former congressman who sought help for addiction and mental health problems after crashing his car into a barrier. US Capitol. He has since become an outspoken advocate for mental health treatment. “In our modern working world, we are still negotiating this,” Mr Kennedy said.

Representative Ritchie Torres, a Bronx Democrat, has been outspoken about his mental health as a member of Congress. But when he began his career in local politics in New York City, he was much more private about the fact that he had been hospitalized for depression. Still, he recalled, rumors swirled about his mental health during his first campaign for a City Council seat.

After that experience, “I made the decision to be open and honest about it,” he said. “It is valuable to tell your own story.”

Ms. Hidalgo was born in Colombia and lived in Peru and Mexico as a child; her family moved to the Houston area when she was in high school. She was a student at Stanford University, she remembers, when she first told her mother that she had been sexually abused at age 11 by a tennis coach in Mexico. Ms. Hidalgo said she sometimes sought out people who knew her as a child to help her understand what happened to her. But mostly she kept it private.

“It was like the stereotypical thing where the shame is so great that we can't even talk about it,” she said.

She said she did not seek residential treatment until after her re-election, which she won by about 18,000 votes. During the campaign, some members of her staff discussed whether she should take time out, but they worried about the impact on her re-election prospects, according to several people who have worked with her.

“For Lina, being a young Latina in a blue city in a red state meant she was already in the crosshairs before she announced her diagnosis,” said Rodney Ellis, a longtime Democratic commissioner in Harris County and an ally of Ms. Hidalgo. . “Admitting you have mental health problems is not the recipe for a successful campaign.”

Still, the political impact of such a revelation would depend on the type of voters a candidate was trying to attract, said Jeronimo Cortina, a political science professor at the University of Houston. “It may be a risk, but that may only apply to an older part of the electorate, who were used to seeing mental health as not part of health,” Cortina said.

Ms. Hidalgo rose to prominence almost overnight in 2018 when, as a progressive candidate and 27-year-old immigrant, she shocked the conservative establishment in Harris County by defeating a popular Republican for the job of district judge, a role that in Texas amounts to on the CEO of the province.

Suddenly she was chairing the county's five-member commissioners' court and serving as emergency manager for the nation's third-most populous county, with 4.7 million residents. She quickly became such a recognizable face in Houston that she sometimes had to wear a purple wig and glasses to anonymously visit the city's art museums.

During her first term, she faced catastrophic events, including flooding, a major chemical fire and the coronavirus pandemic, and clashed with Republican state leaders, including Governor Greg Abbott, over mask mandates and other health restrictions. public health that she tried to impose. Republican donors in Houston poured in money to support her opponent in 2022.

She visited a psychiatrist for the first time a few months before the 2022 election. She was diagnosed with anxiety and given a prescription for medication, and thought she could carry on. “But I still cried all the time,” she said. She tried never to be alone and didn't want to drive a car herself, for fear of what she might do.

She won her race for re-election, but her depression persisted. She was on holiday in Thailand and was the subject of a radiant profile in Vogue magazinebut nothing seemed to help.

Along the way, there were public outbursts that raised questions about her actions. She cursed during a hearing of a commissioner's court while discussing District Attorney Kim Ogg, a fellow Democrat with whom Ms. Hidalgo has frequently clashed.

(Three former assistants of Ms. Hidalgo have been indicted by Ms. Ogg's office and accused of providing inside information to a salesperson before the province awarded an $11 million coronavirus contract. Lawyers for the former assistants have done so denied that any crime had occurred.)

Shortly before Ms. Hidalgo finally sought treatment, she considered resigning. “I'm so glad I didn't do it because it wouldn't have solved anything,” she said in the interview.

After she broke down crying during a medical visit, her doctor said, her doctor connected her to a new psychiatrist, “who immediately realized I was in a really dangerous position” and recommended the Lindner Center of Hope, a clinic in Ohio . She said seeking help saved her life.

She acknowledged that not everyone could afford the seven-week residential treatment she received, at a cost she said totaled about $88,000. She said her boyfriend, David James, a civil rights and personal injury attorney, paid most of the bill. The couple got engaged in January.

When Ms. Hidalgo decided to seek treatment last year, she first told her advisers and political confidantes, including Mr. Ellis, who chaired provincial meetings in her absence and a vote to approve the county's annual budget. Then she told everyone.

“It is important to me personally and professionally to address this issue quickly,” she said in a public statement last summer.

Her decision was praised by local Democrats. At the same time, as her absence continued, some Republicans, including her former opponent, called on her to “return or resign.” Others began trying to remove her from office.

After treatment, she has returned to work but faces new political obstacles, and there are signs that her hold on the commissioners court has weakened, even though Democrats hold four of the five seats on the panel. She recently strongly objected to a pay increase for a county official, but she did just that voted down by a vote of 4 to 1.

Newly elected Houston Mayor John Whitmire, a fellow Democrat who received strong Republican support in the officially nonpartisan mayoral race, has not yet met Ms. Hidalgo. The two leaders held separate news conferences on emergency measures during a recent bout of severe winter weather.

At the Houston Marathon last month, she tried to greet Mr. Whitmire with a hug. But when she approached him, she said, he stiffly extended his arm to stop her and shook her hand instead. “I couldn't reach him to hug him,” she said, adding that he then walked away from her.

(Mary Benton, the mayor's spokeswoman, said Mr. Whitmire “prefers a friendly handshake” to a hug while working, adding that he did not walk away but was “there to celebrate all the runners.” )

Ms. Hidalgo said she tried to put such things into perspective. She has studied the notes of what she learned in treatment, consults them constantly on her phone and has continued to participate in group therapy via video.

“This week's lesson was about bitterness,” she said. “Which is very useful in the political context, right?”