Jason Kander has spent a lot of time running.

First running for the Missouri legislature, then running for Missouri Secretary of State, running for U.S. Senate, then almost choosing to run for President of the United States, which Barack Obama said he should.

Then he ran for mayor of Kansas City. But Jason was also attempting to outrun a mental health problem.

He was on the run from PTSD.

We're going to learn about post-traumatic stress disorder from the inside of that illness.

It's depression mode.

I'm John Moe. I'm glad you're here.

Jason Kander sounds like the kind of guy who runs for president.

Star baseball player and debater goes on to law school, joins the army, sent to Afghanistan to work as an intelligence officer, comes home

and becomes an incredibly ambitious democratic politician, rising through the ranks, developing

a national profile. But in that list of things that Jason did, I kind of breezed over his

time in Afghanistan a little too quickly, because he was in fairly constant mortal

danger there, often operating alone in situations where no one knew where he was, where he

may be killed or have to kill someone at any moment. With trauma, something has happened that

is too much for the brain to process in that moment.

But the brain doesn't give up. It just tries again and again and again. It keeps trying to reason

with what has happened, tries to understand it. For veterans, that again and again thing can mean

applying the same mentality of military life to civilian life when they get back home,

the same hypervigilance, the same tendency to kind of sleep with one eye open, to see threats everywhere.

And that happened to Jason Kander, even as he ran for office after office, until in the middle of a race for mayor of Kansas City,

he finally dropped out to get help.

He writes about all of this in Invisible Storm, a soldier's memoir of politics and PTSD.

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