Democratic congressional candidate Sean Barney is a combat veteran wounded during the second battle of Fallujah in 2006. | John Shinkle/POLITICO One candidate’s risky bet: Talking about his PTSD

Congressional candidate Sean Barney is doing something few politicians have dared: discussing his personal battle to overcome post-traumatic stress disorder from his tour in Iraq.

As a Democrat running for Delaware’s at-large House seat, the Marine Corps veteran on Thursday is marking the 10th anniversary of what he calls his “alive day" — when he was shot through the neck and nearly died — by revealing publicly for the first time the invisible wounds he has struggled with far longer than the physical ones.


Barney will disclose his battle with PTSD at a campaign event to commemorate the day in 2006 when a sniper's bullet in Fallujah left him partially paralyzed. But he acknowledges it’s a political risk that some of his consultants advised him against taking, noting the stigma still attached to PTSD and the long history of real or suspected mental illness damaging candidates’ political prospects.

“There is no doubt about it — there is some unquantifiable risk,” Barney, 41, said in an interview with POLITICO in which he discussed his psychological struggle openly for the first time. He said he is taking the risk to further his argument that the government needs to do far more to care for military veterans of all ages and conflicts.

His own struggles included sleepless nights that ended only after he took anti-anxiety drugs and other medication for several years while regularly visiting Department of Veterans Affairs specialists, Barney said.

“I have the opportunity to run for Congress today because of a lot of things that were done for me, that were done right, and I want to tell that story,” he explained. "I got what I needed, but too many veterans are not" — like his former platoon mate who committed suicide last year.

Former Nebraska senator and presidential candidate Bob Kerrey, a medal of honor recipient who lost part of his leg in Vietnam, praised Barney for his willingness to bare his mental wounds.

“I think it’s a really brave and good thing to do,” Kerrey said. “Post-traumatic stress disorder has had a stigma attached to it that assumes the person is non-functioning. One of the challenges is people who have PTSD, they don’t want to admit it.”

Barney, who lost an election in 2014 for state treasurer to a Republican, is now running against a state legislator and a former Delaware personnel director in the September Democratic primary to succeed Democratic Rep. John Carney, who’s giving up the seat to run for governor.

Barney is backed by VoteVets, which works to elect Democratic veterans to Congress and is known for spending big bucks through its Super PAC on attack ads in House and Senate races and primaries. In 2014, for instance, the group spent hundreds of thousands of dollars helping Rep. Seth Moulton, a Marine Corps veteran and friend of Barney’s, defeat then-Democratic incumbent John Tierney in a Massachusetts primary.

The group’s leader, Jon Soltz, who’s helping throw a fundraiser for Barney next month, said he supports the candidate’s decision to discuss his battles with PTSD on the campaign trail. “I think it shows a lot of people that PTSD isn’t the way it’s been represented by parts of the media and Hollywood,” Soltz said. “It isn’t a condition that should make people afraid of other people.”

But the shame still attached to mental illness remains in many quarters — and it has been especially acute in the political arena, where it has long been seen as a disqualifier for public office.

In 1972, then-Sen. Thomas Eagleton was forced to quit the Democratic vice presidential ticket after it was revealed he had previously been under a psychiatrist’s care for depression. In 1988, Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis was dogged by suggestions he had also undergone such treatment — including a wildly impolitic joke in which President Ronald Reagan referred to him as an “invalid.”

Dukakis’ Republican opponent, Vice President George H.W. Bush, also felt compelled to tell voters he had never been treated for depression or other mental illnesses. And as recently as the 2000 race for the White House, supporters of then-candidate George W. Bush spread rumors that one of his main rivals for the Republican nomination, Sen. John McCain, might be unstable after spending five-and-a-half years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, where he was tortured.

Indeed, Vietnam veterans in particular have frequently been depicted in popular culture as psychologically unhinged — in films like "Taxi Driver," "The Deer Hunter," and "Rambo."

The public perception of mental illness and PTSD in particular has changed.

This week it is a major theme of the Invictus Games in Orlando, where wounded veterans are competing in a host of sporting competitions. The games were kicked off Sunday by George W. Bush and Britain's Prince Harry with a three-hour panel titled, "Addressing the Invisible Wounds of War."

Nevertheless, mental health issues remain misunderstood by the general public and are still stigmatized within the military and veterans community.

Last month, a study by the Government Accountability Office, citing a series of focus groups in and out of uniform, warned that "a stigma exists with seeking mental health care."

Terri Tanielian, a researcher for the government-funded Rand Corporation, said that within the military and veterans population "there is a very high level of concern that coming forward will have impact on their career — they won't be eligible for clearances or they may not be eligible for promotions."

"We have not seen the rates of help-seeking increasing when we do broad representative studies," she added.

Barney, who was a Marine Corps reservist working on the staff of Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) before he was deployed to Iraq, is now running a campaign that emphasizes campaign finance reform and the need to end partisan gerrymandering, along with other liberal planks like establishing a federal minimum wage of $15. He is also highlighting his role as a veteran of the Iraq War in shaping his view that the United States should be very cautious about when to use its military to solve problems abroad.

He said he has decided to discuss his battles with PTSD to help increase understanding of the illness, how it is treatable and to convince others who need help to seek it.

He said he was diagnosed with PTSD in 2006 at a naval hospital in Bethesda, Md., at the beginning of a yearlong recovery from his physical wounds, which included a nerve graft to improve movement of his upper right body, which was paralyzed.

His first and most obvious symptom, he said, was his inability to sleep, which he attributes to his body’s reaction when he was shot.

Earlier that year, as an enlisted infantry “grunt," Barney was conducting daily foot patrols in Fallujah, site of some of the heaviest combat of the Iraq War. It was on one such patrol that he was struck in the neck by a sniper, the bullet barely missing his spine and windpipe.

Barney, pumped up with adrenaline, stood and ran out of the so-called “kill box” — the area within reach of the sniper — but then collapsed, according to a narrative of the shooting by his commanding officer.

“None of us thought you were going to make it,” the officer wrote. “We saw where you were shot, and knew that we had to get you out of there if you were going to have any chance at all.”

A Navy corpsman squeezed off the bleeding from Barney’s jugular vein as his platoon mates rushed him to a surgical center on the outskirts of the city. Barney struggled to stay awake, fearing that if he lost consciousness he might never wake again.

He now believes this life-or-death struggle to remain conscious led to the insomnia he would suffer upon his return to the United States.

“My body would resist going under,” he said. “And so, literally for days, I could just lie there and stare at the ceiling.”

He has since regained the ability to sleep on his own and stopped taking sleep medication several years ago. But that wasn’t his only symptom of PTSD.

After leaving the hospital, Barney attended Yale Law School and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. In an academic environment, he was withdrawn and tried to avoid parties and other social situations.

“I would be in social gatherings and, without any conscious process — I’d be there about 15 minutes, and then I’d just leave,” he said. “I’d go home.”

It took a “dramatic incident,” he explained, to make him realize this was an issue that needed treatment.

As part of his studies he traveled to Senegal in West Africa. On the first day there, something about the architecture in the capital city of Dakar reminded him of Fallujah.

“I remember no real conscious sort of thought process around it, but the group got back to the hotel that evening,” he said. “I went to my room, I packed my bags, I hailed a cab, I went to the airport with no ticket, anything like that, just planning to get a ticket, and I waited around till I could get on a plane, and then I flew home.”

He hadn’t told anybody what he was doing.

“My emergency contacts are getting calls,” he continued. “They think I’ve been abducted in Senegal, and it causes a whole commotion. I get back to the states, and I have all these calls from loved ones, parents.”

Leaving Senegal, he said, had never been a conscious choice, explaining that his “fight or flight” instinct kicked in. It dawned on him at that point that his PTSD went beyond insomnia.

A decade after he was shot, Barney said he is now in a much better place than he was then, in large part because of his quick diagnoses, the sleep and anti-anxiety drugs he was prescribed, his regular visits to the VA and other factors — such as meeting his wife and getting involved in work that makes him feel valued by society, something he said many veterans struggle with.

“There’s an enormous point that needs to be made, that this is a treatable condition — that there’s the other side of the mountain or the other end of the tunnel,” he said. “My post-traumatic stress was recognized and diagnosed at Bethesda. There was no issue of falling into the cracks where I wasn’t with the VA. It was part of my diagnosis when my case was transferred over to the VA, and that’s why I received the treatment that I needed.”

How his openness about his challenges will play among voters remains to be seen. But at least one of his Democratic primary opponents is lauding him for taking such an unprecedented step.

"This is an important issue and there’s more we can do to actively treat those affected with PTSD," Lisa Blunt Rochester, Delaware's former labor secretary, said in a statement. "Sean deserves a lot of credit for sharing his personal experiences.”

Kerrey, the former senator and wounded Vietnam veteran, said he hopes that Barney's decision will be rewarded.

"We’ve come a lot further than we were in 1968," he said. "It probably would have been disqualifying at the time. It’s a real condition. Not only is it treatable, but you can live a normal productive life, including being a member of Congress.”

In his retelling of his private struggle, Barney kept coming back to the 22 veterans on average who kill themselves each day — many of whom are not in the VA health system. He said those are the veterans he worries about: The ones who don’t get diagnosed and are suffering in silence.

The problem, he said, crystallized for him again as he prepared to gather his Marine buddies for the campaign event in Wilmington Thursday to mark the day 10 years ago that the fingers of a Navy corpsman were the difference between life and death. Talking to his fellow former Marines ahead of the event, he wanted to know if anyone had heard from one of their other platoon mates since they got back.

“Anybody know how to get in touch with Ortiz?” he asked. Nobody has heard from him.

Bryan Bender and Connor O'Brien contributed to this report.