Jason Kander has a message for those with PTSD — whether combat veterans or mass shooting survivors

In conservative Missouri, that marked Kander as a Democrat who could relate to gun owners even as he supported background checks opposed by the National Rifle Association. Though he lost that 2016 Senate race, Kander not long thereafter was launching a presidential campaign with encouragement from none other than Barack Obama.

And then, just as suddenly, he abandoned electoral politics — not because of public setbacks, but because of private pain. In October 2018, he announced his decision to seek mental health treatment for depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Kander waited more than a decade before seeking help himself. He had resisted the idea that his four-month tour as an Army intelligence officer in Afghanistan, ending in February 2007, had caused the fear, anger and insomnia that haunted his return to civilian life in Missouri.

“Honestly, I was ashamed of myself for all of this,” Kander writes. Though he endured harrowing moments, “To me, nothing I experienced counted as ‘trauma.’ For one thing, I had never been in a firefight.”

Nor could Missouri voters have suspected his struggles. Kander poured his energy into the relentless political work, in which he showed unusual gifts.

In 2008, at age 27, Kander won a state House seat. Four years later, Missouri voters made him secretary of state.

As his term neared its end in 2016, he leapt onto the national stage with his challenge to incumbent Republican Sen. Roy Blunt. But his emergence as a Democratic celebrity only left him with unspoken guilt, since “I had just become famous for an ad featuring my deft handling of a weapon I’d never fired in combat,” he says in his memoir.

The day after losing that race, Kander saw a therapist for an emergency appointment his worried wife had booked. He was diagnosed with depression, but the following he has attracted in defeat pulled him right back into the political whirl.

“I’d been invited to the cool kids table and it made me feel like a cool kid,” he writes. But the feeling proved fleeting.

Well-positioned to win that comparatively bite-sized race, Kander found himself contemplating suicide more and more. He stunned the political world that October by making his private anguish public.

“After 11 years of trying to outrun depression and PTSD symptoms, I have finally concluded that it’s faster than me,” Kander wrote on Facebook. “That I have to stop running, turn around, and confront it.”

And within months, therapy had dramatically alleviated his pain. His aim in writing the book is to encourage the large number of other veterans suffering PTSD to seek it out for themselves.

“What I want people to take from it is that you can get to the other side,” Kander said in a phone conversation. “It’s worth it.”

Kander sees an echo of the psychological damage combat veterans can suffer in that of the swelling ranks of children and parents who have witnessed and survived America’s mass shooting epidemic. “Trauma is trauma,” he says.