Is Another Kennedy On Psychiatric Meds?
Everybody is talking about Kennedy drooling in the SOTU response. I immediately thought it was a side effect of meds:
Only a few drugs can induce drooling (sialorrhea or hypersalivation) to a clinically significant degree. When significant drooling occurs, however, it can pose a vexing management problem. Drooling is either caused by an increase in saliva flow that cannot be compensated for by swallowing, or by impaired swallowing that cannot handle normal or even reduced amounts of saliva. Major medication groups that are clearly associated with drooling are antipsychotics, particularly clozapine, and direct and indirect cholinergic agonists that are used to treat dementia of the Alzheimer type and myasthenia gravis… Most pharmacological approaches reduce cholinergic tone… increase adrenergic tone (e.g., clonidine patch).
Since he had to talk, stopping to swallow constantly would have been difficult.
Interesting that to diminish salivation you take an adrenergic agent. Beta-adrenergic blockers are very commonly used to blunt the adrenaline from public speaking, and limit performance anxiety. He could have taken a few too many. Probably better than him needing anti-psychotics to be functional.
But it is possible that that like Pat, he has some mental health issues:
Patrick Kennedy received several wake-up calls before he finally heard the bell.
Perhaps the most dramatic was at 2:45 a.m. on a May morning in 2006, when the five-term congressman from Rhode Island drove into a barricade at the U.S. Capitol, appearing incoherent as he told police he was late for a vote.
The next day at a press conference, Kennedy acknowledged that he suffered from long-standing drug and alcohol addiction combined with a bipolar disorder that often pairs with addiction.
That whole family is kind of crazy.
It occurs to me that in the legislative environment, Trump should insist on a law that mandates all House, Senate, and Presidential candidates must under go a full mental-health battery, including tests for any major personality disorders like Narcissism and Sociopathy, in order to be allowed on the ballot, and the full results of those tests, as well as all psychiatric and neuroactive medications prescribed, be made fully public.
I suspect the left would never allow it since probably three quarters of their members are either insane or medicated to the point of barely sane. But he could use the threat, and the possibility of withdrawal of the bill, to get some sort of conciliation in return.
If this idea was to be introduced it would be a massive invasion of privacy, voters don't have access to medical records for physical health conditions, so why should they have access to mental health condition information?
There is so much discrimination towards those with mental health issues already, this would make the situation much much worse.