Wednesday Q+A With Susan Wild

Freshman Rep. Susan Wild did not anticipate making mental health and suicide prevention a key part of her congressional agenda. But that all changed over the summer. Wild revealed on the House floor in June that her lifelong partner, Kerry Acker, had died by suicide in May. In a sit-down with Erin Durkin, the Pennsylvania Democrat discussed how this floor speech kicked off her work on mental-health and suicide-prevention policy. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

I was wondering how you came to the decision to share your story about your partner?

I realized that I needed to use the public platform to try to bring about something positive out of all of that, knowing that I really didn’t at all choose to have that be my platform. … What happened was that as it became known among some people that my partner had died by suicide, I started getting outreach from people around my community, even up here on Capitol Hill, telling me about experiences that they had, or a family member—that kind of thing. Then I just started to feel like it was really important to start talking about it because I started reading about it and realized what an epidemic it was. … I wanted to do a floor speech just about suicide generally and about what needs to be done and ramping up mental-health care, and I didn’t originally expect it to be a very personal story. But as we got closer to the date of me doing it, I just decided I was going to make it a little more impactful by telling the story.

What kind of response did you get from your constituents once you had spoken about it on the House floor?

As people became aware, I just received a tremendous outpouring of sympathy and support—and most significantly, lots and lots and lots of stories from people about their own experiences, their family members, their friends, and people who had said they never felt comfortable talking about it publicly and they were glad that I had.

As you started working on mental-health policy, were there particular challenges that struck you right away as needing immediate attention?

The little bit of studying I had done made me realize how little I knew about how many people commit suicide, how prevalent it is. I think before this happened in my own life, I was very, very aware that veterans have a higher-than-average suicide rate and that LGBT youth do. Those were kind of the two groups of people that I knew had a particularly high incidence of it. It wasn’t until I really started delving in that I realized that it was much, much more common across ethnic lines, across gender lines, although men are more likely to commit suicide than women. The first thing was, we need more information about this, people need more information about this—not just me. That was the No. 1 thing.

Last month, you introduced legislation that would allow families to sign up for health insurance outside of typical enrollment periods should they lose a loved one to suicide. I was wondering what made you focus on this specific issue?

The genesis probably had to do with the fact that my son, who’s 26 and therefore not on my plan and is on a school plan … when he started looking into going to see somebody after this happened—because it really tore my kids apart—we realized he had no mental-health coverage and that he was going to be paying completely out of pocket. … A lot of people think that they don’t really need mental-health coverage. … If you carry health insurance and something else knocks you over, like a diagnosis of cancer, you’re going to have coverage for it under your health insurance policy, but there’s not parity at this point between mental and physical health coverage even though there’s supposed to be.

What has been the reaction of your fellow lawmakers from both sides of the aisle?

I will tell you that I have had tremendous outreach on both sides of the aisle. It sort of mirrors what happened in my home district: people telling me their private stories that hadn’t been spoken of, and just a consensus that we really, really have to get moving on this, that we’re way behind the eight ball—like we’re in the dark ages when it comes to mental-health care.