His life and that of his wife and two daughters moved into a frightful and unexpected horror state.
To wake him up, Jamie yelled, “Tombo, Tombo!” When he did not respond, Jamie knocked and went in.Īnd there, in a dreadful, indelible, irreversible instant of ghastly horror and disbelief, the father found his boy, his extraordinary only son, lying motionless on his bed. When Tommy didn’t respond, his father descended to the basement apartment where Tommy had been living for his second year of law school since the COVID-19 quarantine sent him home from Cambridge in March. When Jamie Raskin woke up on Thursday, Dec. 31, 2020, the last day of the year, he went to the kitchen and called downstairs for Tommy to join him for a banana-and-peanut butter breakfast smoothie. Look after each other, the animals, and the global poor for me. “Tommy” as his father Jamie Raskin (a Democrat representing Maryland’s 8th Congressional District) calls him, was also tormented by depression. Raskin was a law student and teaching assistant at Harvard Law School who donated from his teaching salary to charities in his students’ names. This story appears in the Summer 2021 issue of Town & Country.At the age of 25, Thomas Bloom Raskin had already accomplished a great deal: He was a graduate of Amherst College and a member of several prominent organizations, a passionate vegan who wrote philosophical defenses of animal rights and converted those around him to give up meat. “We’re reaching a crisis point on this specific issue,” he says. “The racism, the misogyny, the irrational thinking and conspiracy theories, the public ridicule and hostility we have allowed to fester in America, especially on the internet, create a difficult emotional and social climate for everyone.” Next up for the congressman: passing a bill to get the National Institutes of Health to complete the first independent study on the damaging effects of social media on children’s emotional, physical, and cognitive development. Covid-19 is hardly the only major stressor. “The state of our society is a crucial component in how we are all doing,” Raskin says. In March the Maryland General Assembly unanimously passed a law-renamed the Thomas Bloom Raskin Act-that will establish a crisis hotline that not only connects callers with counselors but also periodically checks in on them (the program launches in July).
“In theory, federal law governing health insurance now requires them to be treated equally, but this remains more of a paper commitment than a living reality.” Most of the nation’s counties, for example, don’t have a child psychiatrist, and treatments for depression aren’t easily accessible for many families in need. “Tommy’s struggle showed me that our obligation to treat mental health needs is just as urgent as our obligation to treat physical health needs,” Raskin says. In June 2020, 40 percent of adults in the country reported dealing with mental health issues and substance abuse. The pandemic’s toll on mental health has been undeniably catastrophic. (His father is a former constitutional law professor his mother Sarah Bloom Raskin was President Obama’s deputy secretary of the Treasury.) In his twenties he began battling depression, a disorder that afflicts nearly 19 percent of Americans, with those in the 18–29 age group representing the highest percentage (21 percent) of adults who experience symptoms. The 25-year-old had been a second-year student at Harvard Law School, his parents’ alma mater. “Tommy Raskin had a perfect heart, a perfect soul, a riotously outrageous and relentless sense of humor, and a dazzling, radiant mind,” Raskin wrote in an emotional tribute.
JAMIE RASKIN SON THOMAS TRIAL
Jamie Raskin speaking during former President Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial at the U.S. The family had buried him only the day before the Capitol insurrection. In the midst of all of that, Raskin and his wife were grieving a terrible tragedy at home: the death of their son Thomas (Tommy to those who knew him), who took his own life on New Year’s Eve. Instead they hid under a desk and thought they were going to die. It also happened to be the day Raskin had brought his daughter Tabitha and son-in-law Hank with him to work, so that they could witness the counting of electoral votes and what should have been an iconic moment in American democracy: the peaceful transfer of power. On that day Raskin, like his fellow lawmakers, had been forced to take cover in the building-and put on a gas mask-as throngs of far-right protesters spent hours defacing art, breaking glass, looting offices, and gravely injuring police officers. Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin was thrust onto the national stage earlier this year when he was chosen by Speaker Nancy Pelosi to lead the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump on the charge of inciting a mob to storm the Capitol on January 6.
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