JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. – A new partnership has formed across the aisle with the goal of ending the stigma that surrounds mental health problems like depression.
Reps. Genise Montecillo, D-St. Louis, and Keith Frederick, R-Rolla, announced their plan last week. Both Frederick and Montecillo have personal backgrounds dealing with these issues. Frederick, an orthopedic surgeon, has sought to highlight the struggles of medical students and teenagers at risk of committing suicide.
On the first day of the 2016 session, Montecillo spoke to the entire body about her own suicide attempt which happened last summer.
“It was extremely difficult,” she says of the experience. “If you had asked me six months ago, six weeks, or six days before I did it, I would have told you that I wouldn’t do it.”
However, she expressed her gratitude for a House that was all too ready to welcome her just after her attempt.
“I cannot emphasize enough how my colleagues’ support has helped me,” Montecillo says. She adds that while she was still in the hospital that among family and friends she began to hear from her fellow representatives. “My son with tears streamed down his face, he just read the stories and letters and emails and calls from my colleagues and my constituents.”
She said well-wishes and prayers from the majority party also left a deep impact on her. The people she had done battle with on the House floor told her they wanted her back on the floor at veto session, and some sent multiple cards a week just to tell her she was in their prayers.
Frederick himself notes that this issue has no basis in partisanship and that he was looking forward to proposing legislation to raise awareness for mental health problems. Frederick is currently working on one bill called the “Show-Me Compassionate Medical Education Act,” which seeks to reduce the suicide rate and treat depression for medical students across the state.
“I believe the fact that Representative Montecillo and I are working together, in a bipartisan fashion, will help to showcase that this problem is not a conservative or a liberal problem, it is not a Republican or Democrat problem, but rather is a problem that we experience as human beings when we are placed in certain stressful situations over a long period of time,” Frederick wrote in his Jan. 15 Capitol Report.
Frederick and Montecillo will also do a lot of work outside of the legislature. They will both be attending an event in St. Louis to raise funds for a documentary called “Do No Harm,” which again investigates depression among medical students. Frederick also noted that his partnership with Montecillo would definitely lead to a broadening of their views.
For Montecillo’s part, she has returned to the Capitol and for the last two days, has spoken in opposition to two pieces of legislation on photo voter identification. That return to normalcy is part of her story. When her attempt was first made public by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, she said it was an intrusion that she feared would affect not only her personal relationships, but her professional life.
“I thought I could never go back to work, I’ll never teach again and I was just ready to curl up and never leave the hospital,” Montecillo says. “It was devastating because you think people are going to judge and they haven’t.”
Now, she wants to end the societal taboo against discussing mental illnesses, like depression, to make sure that people do not fear they will be judged for speaking out about their emotional state.
“As I’ve slowly kind of started coming forward about it, talking about it, what gave me courage was having other people tell their stories,” she says. “We’re silent about it, we do feel ashamed about it and that just proliferates the stigma… Silence kills in this case, and people need to know it’s okay to ask for help.”
