Patrick Kennedy recently sat down for an interview with 60 Minutes, where he talks about his own substance abuse, as well as that of his family. Kennedy will soon be releasing his memoir, "A Common Struggle: A Personal Journey Through the Past and Future of Mental Illness and Addiction." People reprints his quotes as follows:
"I am an addict. I'll always be an addict. But I'm an addict in recovery. I count my days. It's one day at a time...I don't tell, in this book, about my family stories as some way to talk about their story. This is my story. These experiences are embedded in me. My father went on in silent desperation for much of his life, self-medicating and unwittingly passing his unprocessed trauma onto my sister, brother and me. My dad never got to grieve. He had to be there for the country. He had to be there for my family. He had to be there for my uncle Bobby's 11 children, and John and Caroline...This is like breaking the family code here. I am now outside the family line. I was hostage to the family code that no, don't say anything about it. Anything you say, it's disloyal. It's against the family code."
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