A Brother’s Mental Illness Influenced John Kasich’s Views

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/26/us/politics/john-kasich-brother.html

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PITTSBURGH — Gov. John Kasich often speaks about mental health in his campaign for president. He has defended his decision to expand Medicaid in Ohio by highlighting its benefits for mentally ill residents.

He is probably the only Republican candidate this year to ask a crowd, “Do you know what it’s like for somebody to live with depression?”

The question, posed at a rally in upstate New York recently, threw a hush over a room of 1,000 people. Mr. Kasich went on:

“There are people here who know exactly what I’m talking about.”

Mr. Kasich is one who knows.

His only brother, Richard, 59, has struggled with depression disorders since college. He was occasionally hospitalized and today receives disability benefits for mental illness.

The Kasich brothers have taken vastly different paths from their hometown, McKees Rocks, Pa., an industrial suburb of Pittsburgh.

John Kasich, 63, began a political career at age 26 as the youngest person ever elected to the Ohio Senate. Rick Kasich, who once hoped to be a lawyer, suffered a breakdown at Penn State, he said, and ended up washing pots and pans at a Wendy’s after leaving college.

John Kasich served 18 years in the House of Representatives and is a two-term Ohio governor. Rick Kasich — who says he learned he had manic depression, an earlier name for bipolar disorder, after a stay in a Michigan hospital — worked for more than two decades loading mail trucks at a Pittsburgh post office.

For one of his town-hall-style events on Monday, the day before the Pennsylvania primary, John Kasich returned to McKees Rocks, where he has become known for dispensing hugs and speaking of bringing people “out of the shadows.”

His general sense of empathy on the campaign trail is part of his appeal to moderate Republicans. But people who have worked with Mr. Kasich, including aides, political allies and mental health advocates, say it is likely to have come in part from his personal experience — and, as in millions of American families dealing with mental illness, that experience has often been difficult.

The brothers did not speak for 19 years. Though they have been reconciled for a decade, their exchanges can be testy, to hear Rick Kasich describe them.

“He doesn’t have much to do with me, and I don’t have much to say about him,” Rick Kasich said in his first extended interview with a reporter.

He said he had watched about five minutes of a Republican debate before the Ohio primary but has not paid close attention to his brother’s campaign. He had no plans to attend the event in McKees Rocks.

People who have worked closely with Mr. Kasich are vaguely aware of his brother, but the governor never discusses him on the campaign trail and declined to be interviewed about him.

His campaign did send a statement on behalf of Mr. Kasich and other relatives:

“We love Rick deeply and have shared the struggles that his disease brings with it. As families with a loved one living with mental illness know, you take it one day at a time, and some days are better than others.

“In the process, we have all become sensitive to and supportive of the needs of those living with this disease. Among the ways we support him is by working hard to protect his privacy, and we hope others respect that also.”

With gray hair falling below his shoulders and sunglasses that he rarely removes, Rick Kasich spoke to a reporter outside a Pittsburgh coffee shop last week, dropping the butts of one Pall Mall after another into a cup of water. He had agreed to be interviewed and he talked freely about his mental illness and his relationship with the governor, as well as about his life and his decades in the area.

A Pittsburgh Pirates hat sat on a table. He said he had been to just one Pirates game in his life. “It was years ago, when the Pirates were at Three Rivers Stadium,” he said. “There were teenagers smoking pot on the ramp. I said I’d never go to another game again.”

Waving an arm to take in the neighborhood, a gentrifying district where young people in sandals carry rolled yoga mats, he said that “everyone around here” liked his brother.

It was certainly a different kind of place from McKees Rocks. As John Kasich tells almost every audience, he grew up the son of a mailman in a blue-collar town where “if the wind blew the wrong way, people found themselves out of work.”

The brothers’ family was stable, if not well off. His parents’ largest assets were United States savings bonds. Their house was valued at $56,500 in 1987 at the time of their deaths in an automobile accident.

Former high school teachers have called young John one of their best students in decades, excelling at public speaking. Rick Kasich said he had never felt overshadowed by his brother, who was off to college the year Rick entered ninth grade.

At Penn State, Rick Kasich recalled, he took philosophy courses, developing an interest in Immanuel Kant, and he formed a lifelong love for Bob Dylan and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, artists he listens to regularly today.

“I felt I had a breakdown in my freshman year in the spring of 1975,” he said. “I knew I was not going to be a lawyer anymore.”

As a young man, he became a born-again Christian, and he spends early mornings taping music or evangelical preachers on the radio with a cassette player. “I’ve made 101 cassettes since the first of the year,” he said. “They’re all numbered and dated.”

The two Kasichs (they also have a younger sister, Donna) resemble each other in gestures, in their oval faces and in their sometimes brusque expressiveness.

Both also wear their faith on their sleeves. Rick Kasich kept a pocket-size copy of biblical verses on the table beside him, its pages annotated with the dates he first read passages that struck him.

“My brother preached to the Orthodox Jews in New York,” Rick Kasich said, referring to a recent appearance at a synagogue on Long Island, which he said his brother had told him about. “I am very proud of him.”

Repeatedly, though, he returned to the root of the animosity with his brother, which in his mind began with the tragic death of their parents. Pulling out of a Burger King across the Ohio River from McKees Rocks, John and Anne Kasich, both 67, were struck by a drunken driver.

On the stump, their son John mentions the accident frequently as a devastating chapter in his life that he survived through a reawakening of his Christianity.

For Rick Kasich, it was something else. His parents’ will put John in control of Rick’s share of their estate, which totaled about $300,000, apparently because the senior Kasichs were worried about Rick’s mental stability.

When John sold the family home, which Rick wanted to live in, he was furious. He said he had hired a lawyer to challenge the will and had succeeded in gaining his share of the estate. He and his wife, Andrea, used it to buy a two-story brick house with leaded-glass windows for $103,000, not far from Carnegie Mellon University.

“My brother told me, ‘If you sue me, I won’t have anything to do with you,’ ” Rick Kasich said, in his version of events. For the next 19 years, as John Kasich rose in Congress, undertook a short-lived presidential run in 1999 and entered the private sector as a banker, they never spoke.

Although Rick Kasich drank heavily after his parents’ death, he said, he has been sober for several years.

Then in 2006, the year his wife died, Rick Kasich said, a lawyer told him to call his brother.

“I called him,” he said.

“I’ve been praying for you,”’ John Kasich replied, according to his brother.

On the stump and in debates, Mr. Kasich is the only Republican candidate who regularly invokes mental illness. Challenged at a debate about why he expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, a decision that enraged conservatives, Mr. Kasich answered: “I had an opportunity to bring resources back to Ohio to do what? To treat the mentally ill. Ten thousand of them sit in our prisons.”

In upstate New York, his mention of the prevalence of depression was in response to an audience question about controlling drug costs.

Drug makers have argued that their revenue pays for the development of new medications, and Mr. Kasich told the crowd that he would not want to do anything to shut down research. “The way it’s been described to me is it’s like waking up every single day stuck in tar,” he said of depression. “And for these people, it’s really hard.”

Rick Kasich said a drug, Abilify, was helpful in managing his current diagnosis, schizoaffective disorder, which he called a “grab bag” of symptoms of schizophrenia and depression. He was quick to add that he was not schizophrenic.

As he sipped coffee, he said that he used to have panic attacks but that his current medication suppressed them. He said embracing Christianity also had a positive influence. “I got saved,” he said. “It seemed to help.”

One of his most recent contacts with his brother, he recalled, was on Easter. The exchange seemed to typify a relationship that is not always easy.

“He called and said, ‘He has risen,’ ” Rick Kasich said.

The governor’s brother recalled his own brusque reply.

“I said, ‘I know that.’ ”