Gordon Smith

I ran into Sen. Gordon Smith (R-Oregon) at the NMHA conference on Friday. I knew him peripherally when I was a reporter in Portland, so I went up to him and apologized for something I had written in Jan. 2004. That was about four months after his son, Garret, had killed himself in Utah, where he was attending college.

I'd written an article about suicide and in it I had chided America for being blind to just how big a problem suicide and mental illness are in our nation, and that the utter silence on the matter in our culture was costing us lives. I briefly noted that Smith himself had yet to take to the Senate floor to say something--hell, anything--on the matter. I cringed when I wrote that about Smith. It was still very close to the event, but he's also a US Senator and has an obligation that is different from regular citizens. It's called leadership.

Smith took to the Senate floor that summer and delivered what was apparently one of the most powerful speeches given in that chamber in ages. The kind of raw personal shit you just don't hear in public very often. (Google it, if you want.) Since then, he has gotten about $75 million in funding for suicide prevention through Congress--something the feds had never really funded comprehensively previously--and written a book with his wife. It's not clear if he will be the leader in Congress on mental health issues, a role long filled by Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM). He did play a key role in beating back Bush Administration cuts to Medicaid this budget year--and that took some guts. And, I suspect that in coming years (he's in a safe seat since he's a moderate Republican in a state where progressives and conservatives largely cancel one another out), he'll step up to the plate on a range of issues affecting mental health. He may do it publicly, he may do it behind the scenes. But, no matter what he does, no one in either party will be able to screw with him.

We've needed someone like that on our side for a long time. That's what I was telling him last week. I just didn't use those words.