Jason Kander, a Jewish Kansas City native and former Missouri Secretary of State, is perhaps best known for going public with his struggles with PTSD and stepping down from his 2018 Kansas City mayoral campaign to focus on his mental health.
Since then, Kander has become an advocate for veterans, working with the Veterans Community Project, a Kansas City-based nonprofit that provides services and support to veterans, including temporary housing designed to get homeless veterans off the street and transitioned to permanent housing. Kander is the organization’s president of national expansion.
He is also a bestselling author with his second book, “Invisible Storm: A Soldier’s Memoir of Politics and PTSD,” coming out in July.
This article is an abridged transcript from Getting to Know Jew. Answers have been edited for length and clarity.
What do you love about the Kansas City Jewish community?
Being involved in national politics, I’ve had the opportunity to travel around and to spend time in the Jewish communities in a lot of other cities. I think what’s unique about it here is, I’ve never done anything with another member of the Jewish community here where we’ve had a conversation that lasted more than a few seconds about which temple they were from, or which denomination. I do think that that is a little bit unique.
Nationally, there are sometimes issues where both sides within the Jewish world tend to often treat it as a litmus test as to how “good of a Jew” you are. And I don’t detect that here, and that’s really interesting to me, and it’s something I value a lot. The Jewish community here is really dedicated to making Kansas City and the whole community a better place. And that’s deeply rooted here in a special way.
What led you to get involved and help elevate Veterans Community Project to this level, where it’s now expanding to places outside of Kansas City?
I was running for mayor in 2018, and I was also — as is pretty well known at this point — not doing so well personally. I was suffering from undiagnosed, untreated PTSD, and had been for about a decade at that point and had not gone to get treatment or anything. The race was going very well but I was not. Like I had one good day personally on that campaign and it was the day that I toured the Veterans Community Project. It was in August of 2018, and I was just knocked over by the vibe.
It’s run by my fellow combat veterans who are out to achieve things for veterans in the Kansas City community, both through an outreach operation that serves all veterans with any possible need and through a residential operation that serves homeless veterans and transitions them into permanent housing. I went home that night and I told my wife, “Boy, I wish I could just quit everything I’m doing and go work there.” But I didn’t really wholly mean that because like, I was a politician, I was in a campaign.
And then about six weeks after that, I dropped out of everything. My symptoms had gotten bad enough where I was having more frequent suicidal thoughts and that kind of thing. I went to the VA to get help and they told me that it was going to be five or six months before I could get enrolled in the system and start therapy.
I wasn’t sure what to do at that point. It was the day before I announced that I was going to drop out of everything and make public that I suffered from PTSD. I called Brian Meyer, one of the cofounders of Veterans Community Project, who was also a friend of mine, and I was like, “What do I do?” And he said, “Why don’t you come on down here?” So, six weeks after getting the VIP “you’re going to be mayor” treatment, I went through the front doors of the outreach center, like thousands of other vets in Kansas City. They handled my paperwork for me, expedited the process at the VA, and about a week later I was starting therapy.
That made a huge difference in my life, obviously. I started hanging around (Veterans Community Project) and I was doing a lot better in therapy and everything, and Brian and his co-founders were trying to figure out how they could answer the call from these communities all over the country that were saying, “Hey, we love what you’ve done in Kansas City, would you ever consider coming here and expanding?” They’d started to try it a little bit and they were having some stops and starts with it. I had created a national organization before called Let America Vote, so Brian said, “Why don’t you just come here and help us full time?”
That’s how I became the president of national expansion. And since then, we’ve been expanding into the Denver area, to St. Louis to Sioux Falls to Oklahoma City, and we have (other locations) coming after that.
Why did you make the decision to be so public about the PTSD and the struggles that you had?
By the time I was making the decision to treat it, I knew that the only way I was going to be able to do it effectively was to stop trying to distract myself with other things and just focus on it. And I felt like if I could just be my more authentic self, it might make healing a little bit easier. I knew that there would be challenges that come with that – obviously opening yourself up and having everybody know about your mental health comes with its own issues.
But then what really pushed me over the edge was I wanted something good to come of it. And I felt like if somebody in a public position like mine had done that 10 years earlier, maybe I would have gone and gotten treatment 10 years earlier, and maybe I wouldn’t have been in the situation that I was in.
I just kind of felt an obligation to do that and to help reduce the stigma. I figured maybe some other people will get help if I did and fortunately, gratifyingly, I’ve heard from thousands of people over the last few years who have told me that that’s what prompted them to decide to go and get help, both veterans and nonveterans.
You’ve referred to yourself as a politician in the past tense. Do you see yourself on a ballot again anytime soon?
Maybe. The big difference in my life now is I don’t think about the future all the time, because I’m enjoying the present. If you could wave a magic wand right now and make me a US senator, I’d be like, “No, thanks,” because I prefer the job I have.
I’m coaching Little League and I’m playing baseball, and I really enjoy it. I work out six days a week, and my wife’s career is going great. I have two kids and I drop off my son at school every morning and I pick him up at three o’clock every day. My life is right where I want it right now.
But the other thing is, I’m still involved, right? In a myriad of different ways. I have the luxury of, if there’s something that I want said politically that’s not being said, or if I want to get involved with some campaign here and there and that kind of thing, I can. And it’s a huge luxury because I have a platform.
I don’t think that you have to be a candidate to be considered in politics. Maybe one day I will, I don’t rule it out at all. Right now, it does not interest me at all, because it’s like any other job, right? When you are considering taking a new job, you think about whether you like it better than the job you have, and right now I’m in the best civilian job I’ve ever had.
