Senator's tearful plea helps pass suicide bill

For a few moments on Thursday, the only sounds in the U.S. Senate chamber were the sobs of a grieving father.

Oregon Republican Gordon Smith took the floor to introduce a youth suicide prevention bill named after his dead son. With unusual speed, the Senate unanimously passed the measure within hours.

"He saw only despair ahead and felt only pain in his present. Pain and despair so potent that he sought suicide as a release.

As a release," Smith said, recalling his son, Garrett, who killed himself in his college apartment last September, one day before his 22nd birthday.

Smith recalled a "beautiful child, a handsome baby boy" that he and his wife Sharon adopted a few days after birth. He had vast intellectual gifts but struggled with learning disabilities, dyslexia, and bipolar disorder, sometimes called manic depression, Smith said.

There is "no owner's manual to help you bury a child, especially when the cause is suicide," he said.

The Senate chamber was nearly empty when Smith began to speak. But by the time he had finished, several colleagues had lined up to embrace him, and two rose to tell of the suicides of their fathers.

Nevada Democrat Harry Reid recalled attending Garrett's funeral and hearing everyone speak openly about the suicide. After his own father shot himself, Reid said, he was too ashamed to discuss it for years.

If a bill like Smith's had been in effect when his father was a young man, Reid said, "my dad may not have had all the problems that he had as he proceeded through life."

Oklahoma Republican Don Nickles then rose to say his father too had killed himself.

"I'm not going to go into the details," he said. "But it's a lot of pain.

"I have no doubt as a result of us passing this legislation, we'll end up saving a lot of lives, maybe thousands of lives," Nickles said.

The $60 million bill, which the U.S. House of Representatives has not yet taken up, would help states develop prevention strategies and would fund more mental health services on college campuses.

More than 30,000 Americans kill themselves each year, and suicide is the third-leading cause of death for people aged 10-24.

New Mexico Republican Pete Domenici, who has been public about his daughter's schizophrenia, had gone home early but threw on a suit and dashed back to the Senate to sympathize with Smith.

Domenici said he would make another push for the bill he has advocated for years that would require health insurers to treat serious mental illness the same way they treat physical illness.

He also lashed out at fellow Republicans who had anonymously used a procedural move to block it.

"I don't know who you are yet," said Domenici, "but I'll find out."