“I didn’t volunteer to be a champion of this issue, but it arose out of the personal experience of being a parent who lost a child to mental illness and suicide,” Smith said in 2004, in one of the most emotional Senate floor speeches in memory. Smith, R-Ore., lost his son Garrett Lee Smith in 2003, he led enactment of landmark legislation that established the Garrett Lee Smith Memorial Suicide Prevention Program, providing grants to state and tribal governments for youth suicide prevention and early intervention efforts across the country. In the past, personal grief has prompted legislative action on Capitol Hill. Tommy Raskin graduated from Amherst College in western Massachusetts and was a second-year student at Harvard Law School, where according to the family his professors have included Bruce Mann, the husband of Democratic Sen. Sarah Bloom Raskin is a former deputy Treasury secretary and Federal Reserve governor. The Raskins, well known not only on Capitol Hill and in the congressman’s Montgomery County-based congressional district but across official Washington, have seen an outpouring of support since their son’s Dec. “The pain became overwhelming and unyielding and unbearable at last for our dear boy, this young man of surpassing promise to our broken world,” the Raskins wrote. “Tommy Raskin had a perfect heart, a perfect soul, a riotously outrageous and relentless sense of humor, and a dazzling radiant mind,” the Raskins wrote in the statement, describing his struggle with depression as a “relentless torture in the brain.” Jamie Raskin and his wife, Sarah Bloom Raskin, remembered their 25-year-old son Tommy in a private funeral ceremony Tuesday, a day after releasing a heartrending public tribute.
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