In 2023, when Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman went to the hospital for depression, many people on Capitol Hill praised him for being brave and open about his mental health problems.

Now, a shocking picture of relapse and the cost that comes with it is being linked to him after writer Ben Terris’s profile of Fetterman in New York Magazine’s Intelligencer came out on Friday.

Democrats on Capitol Hill haven’t said anything yet. But people were shocked by what the profile said, and it was clear on political talk shows and social media.

“He needs to resign,” Jonathan Last of The Bulwark, who wrote that the senator was “the first person to suggest that John Fetterman could run for president,” said on The Secret Podcast with Sarah Longwell. Last is a supporter of Fetterman.

Longwell agreed and said that the piece’s findings were “the end of a career.”

Terris uses a lot of lines from Adam Jentleson, who used to be Fetterman’s chief of staff and works on Capitol Hill. He also uses what current and past senator’s office workers have said about a man who is stressed out by the challenges of his job and has a hard time accepting the help he may still need to fully recover.

Fetterman had a stroke in the last few months of his 2022 Senate campaign. He still managed to pull off a much-needed win for the Democrats, even though it was clear from his performance in the debate that he was still having serious speech and hearing problems.

His comeback, on the Hill and across the country, gave hope to many. In some situations, he still uses audio recording devices during conversations, but he can still talk in interviews and news conferences.

Things are said to be much less hopeful in private, though. New York Magazine first reported that the senator was in a major car accident in May or June 2024, in which his wife Gisele was hurt. He allegedly ignored staffers’ concerns, got behind the wheel, and then fell asleep. A video of him arguing with a commercial plane pilot about how visible his seatbelt was came back to the public this weekend after the story came out.

New York Magazine’s profile and other sources also talk about other interactions between the senator and those around him that are getting a lot of attention. For example, the senator is said to have frequent and heated personal conversations with his wife, Gisele Fetterman, about Israel’s siege of Gaza and other problems.

Terris says Fetterman is still having a hard time with the responsibilities of his job. In January, just days after Trump was sworn in, he lost it and couldn’t decide whether to back Pete Hegseth, who is now Donald Trump’s Secretary of Defence and is in trouble. A staff member said that before the vote, the senator brought up the idea of leaving DC and not voting at all. Terris also said that he “spent part of the day locked in his office, fighting with Gisele and crying while FaceTiming with staff.”

“The fact that I voted against Pete Hegseth says it all.” “The rest is just guesswork,” Fetterman told Terris about the story above.

Jentleson, who had quit his job as chief of staff months before the car accident, wrote a letter to the senator’s doctors before the accident in the summer of 2024 to warn them of his increasingly unstable and dangerous behaviour. Jentleson wrote that he could see that Fetterman was not making progress with his mental health healing.

According to Gisele Fetterman in a statement to New York Magazine, Jentleson told her “scary, untrue stories about John’s health.” She also said that his letter was part of a plot to hurt her husband’s political image.

After 2025, that image might be a mess. Some of his votes to approve Trump’s nominees, like Pam Bondi for attorney general, were seen as the worst kind of betrayal by many Democrats. It was clear how much he supported Israel’s military operation in Gaza. This caused a new wave of disgusted criticism from progressives on Twitter and Bluesky, who said the senator was fervently supporting the killing. Fetterman told New York Magazine that this wasn’t true.

“I don’t feel sorry for John Fetterman.” He has always been racist. Activist Tanisha Long from Pittsburgh wrote on Twitter about an event in 2013: “Those in Pittsburgh and Braddock remember him pulling a gun on a Black jogger and holding him hostage.”

But most Democrats who talked about it over the weekend were shocked by how many problems the senator has that haven’t been covered. For example, there were questions about whether he still has the mental capacity and stability to be in office. Some people thought the worries were way too big.