Newly minted Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) could reportedly stay in the hospital for a lengthy period of time after checking himself in to receive treatment for “clinical depression” last week.
After speaking to a Fetterman senior aide, the Wall Street Journal reported:
[…]His office said that Mr. Fetterman has experienced depression off and on throughout his life and that the senator voluntarily entered the hospital after consulting with the attending physician for Congress, Dr. Brian P. Monahan.
A senior aide to Mr. Fetterman said in an interview late Friday that the senator will remain hospitalized as doctors try out new medications and dosages to test their efficacy. Mr. Fetterman will also engage in talk therapy, the aide said, meeting with a professional therapist to discuss the experiences he has had, including the challenges of campaigning for office.
The hospital stay could range from weeks to more than a month, but likely less than two months, the aide said, citing the time frame the doctors are focusing on. [Emphasis added.]
This comes after the senator checked himself into Walter Reed National Military Medical Center to receive treatment for clinical depression last Wednesday, according to a statement from Fetterman’s chief of staff, Adam Jentleson. He noted that Fetterman would be “receiving treatment on a voluntary basis” after having “experienced depression off and on throughout his life.”
However, that was the second time the senator had been in the hospital in recent weeks. The week before, Fetterman was hospitalized after he “began feeling lightheaded.” At the time, Fetterman’s communication director, Joe Cavello, said that “initial tests did not show evidence of a new stroke” but that more tests would be run.
The senator’s wife, Gisele Fetterman, said in pair of tweets on Thursday, following the news of her husband, “After what he’s been through in the past year, there’s probably no one who wanted to talk about his own health less than John.” She also asked everyone to please respect their family’s privacy during the “difficult time.”
On the campaign trail, the senator suffered a stroke before clinching the Democrat nomination for the U.S. Senate seat in Pennsylvania. However, as Breitbart News previously noted:
Fetterman [on the campaign trail] routinely appeared disoriented in public appearances throughout the campaign, regularly mispronouncing words and confusing sentences. After a disastrous interview with NBC Nightly News, reporter Dasha Burns drew criticism for noting how Fetterman’s stroke impaired him in a variety of ways, from his comprehension to his basic speech, to the point of him needing a closed captioning system during their in-person interview.
“Fetterman’s campaign required closed captioning technology for this interview to essentially read our questions as we asked them,” she told fellow reporter Lester Holt. “In small talk before the interview, without captioning, it wasn’t clear he was understanding our conversation.”
He went on to win the election against his Republican opponent, Mehmet Oz, in November, despite his poor debate performance.
Jacob Bliss is a reporter for Breitbart News. Write to him at jbliss@breitbart.com or follow him on Twitter @JacobMBliss.