Senator George McGovern’s exposure to mental illness changed the course of both his political and personal lives, and he explained how at APA’s 2000 annual meeting last month in Chicago.

McGovern, now an ambassador to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, presented a lecture to a standing-room-only crowd after being presented with APA’s Award for Patient Advocacy. He was honored for his personal courage and public contributions toward eliminating the stigma of mental illness.

After the 1994 death of his daughter, Terry, Senator McGovern established the Terry McGovern Foundation to honor her memory by helping families deal with alcoholism. The Foundation helps to fund research and assists recovery centers in their fundraising and treatment efforts, with special emphasis on women’s issues and relapse prevention.

McGovern recalled that his first encounter with the consequences of mental illness came after he won the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination.

A firestorm of controversy erupted when a press leak revealed that his vice-presidential running mate, Sen. Thomas Eagleton, had had manic-depressive illness for some time. When this news reached the American public, McGovern was suddenly faced with the difficult decision of whether to drop his trusted and seemingly stable running mate. He consulted two psychiatrists for advice, knowing very little about the disorder.

One of those with whom he consulted, prominent psychiatrist Karl Menninger, M.D., cautioned that the road ahead was strife with difficulties, especially in the political sense. Menninger surmised that millions of Americans would vote against McGovern knowing that his running mate had a mental illness. Nonetheless, he also speculated that a large number of Americans would sympathize with Eagleton because they knew someone in their own lives with a mental illness and would not forgive McGovern if he asked his running mate to step down.

Ultimately, McGovern decided to drop Eagleton from the ticket and later lost the presidential nomination to his opponent, Richard Nixon.

McGovern again encountered mental illness in the person of his would-be assassin, Arthur Bremer, whose plans to kill both him and Richard Nixon were foiled at the last minute. Unfortunately, Bremer succeeded in shooting and injuring Democratic candidate Governor George Wallace, who was severely crippled during the incident.

McGovern’s most profound and traumatic experience with mental illness, however, involved the alcoholism and depression of his daughter, Terry. After an enjoyable evening out with his wife during the Christmas season in 1994, Senator McGovern was relaxing in his home. The sound of the doorbell shortly before midnight startled him. Expecting an out-of-town visit from his daughter, Terry, he rose to answer the door. Instead he found a police officer and a clergyman. They informed him that Terry had been found dead earlier that day in Madison, Wis. She had frozen to death in the snow while heavily intoxicated.

McGovern described his daughter as a bright, creative, and compassionate young woman with a delightful sense of humor. She was also diagnosed with alcoholism and clinical depression. As a college student at the University of Virginia, she had undergone four years of psychoanalysis for depression. Although she medicated the pain of her depression with alcohol, her excessive drinking was not addressed in therapy. In subsequent years there would be Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, antidepressants, counselors, and medical care.

At one point, Terry achieved sobriety for eight years, a period during which she fell in love, got married, and had two daughters. At the end of this relatively stable and happy time, she relapsed. After achieving sobriety for another year following treatment for both depression and alcoholism, she relapsed again. It was at this point that her husband left her, which devastated Terry, and her sobriety ended for good.

In the last four years of her life, Terry had been in and out of one treatment center in Madison 68 times. During her treatment at this facility, Terry had refused to sign documents that would have allowed her treatment team to inform her parents of her condition.

In the meantime, the McGoverns wanted her to return home and hoped to enroll Terry in a promising experimental program for the treatment of alcoholism at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). They persuaded her to enroll, and she cooperated with the treatment regimen. She remained in the program for six weeks, which was two weeks longer than the average stay.

McGovern recalled the beautiful spring day on which his daughter was released from NIH. Terry was beaming and seemed confident. Not long after arriving home, Terry asked her father if she could use his car to pick up some toiletries at the store. A few hours later, a bartender called McGovern and asked him to pick up his daughter, who lay unconscious on the barroom floor after consuming too much alcohol.

Later, upon one of her many releases from the detoxification center, Terry walked into a Madison bar to toast the Christmas holiday with a friend. When the bartender refused to serve Terry any longer, she stumbled out into the night and walked a short distance in the foot-deep snow. Eventually, she lay or fell down in the snow in an alley. Her lifeless body was found the next afternoon.

McGovern has learned a great deal from his daughter’s struggle with alcoholism. In retrospect, he now sees alcoholism as a potentially fatal disease. "As difficult as it is, we have to learn that we must separate our hatred of this disease from our love for its victim. Nobody wanted to get better more eagerly than Terry."