A Cause of Her Own

By Margaret Carlson/Washington

Tipper Gore has been lugging around a textbook on depression, which is oddly out of place in the hands of such a cheerful woman, the one person who seems to be able to unstuff the shirt of Vice President Al Gore. He gets so relaxed around her that at one of the marathon health-care task force meetings recently, he rubbed her aching neck. The neck notwithstanding, the Vice President says Tipper is "having a blast" in her job as mental-health adviser to the President's health-care task force, a slight exaggeration of the pleasure of spending late nights poring over options for psychiatric outplacement. But it's no exaggeration of her impact: she is the voice for mental health within the Administration. Says her press secretary Sally Aman: "She is at the table at every turn to remind the group that mental health . should have parity with physical health."

Tipper's voice is controversial because, if heeded, it will add billions of dollars to the health-care bill. Before the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee, she said, "The same outrage expressed when we are confronted by race or sex discrimination must be voiced to expose the difference between how physical and mental illnesses traditionally have been viewed." She can be outraged, but part of her appeal is that she can be serious without being somber. As she sits in a wing chair sipping Mountain Valley spring water in her high-ceilinged office filled with evidence of the two interests in her life -- psychology books and a gallery of her photos -- she is happy to be here, working at her first full-time job out of the house since she married Gore in 1970. Armed with a master's degree in psychology, Tipper has taken fiercely to her new role, embarking on more than 30 trips around the country, chairing hearings and giving speeches.

Her own life was aided by counseling when her son, at the age of six, was nearly killed in an automobile accident in 1989. In her Senate testimony, she noted how hard it is to get the head treated as well as the body. Plaintively, she recalled Rosalynn Carter's trip to the same committee asking for the same thing in 1979. "What is wrong," she asked, "if so little has changed in the intervening 14 years that we must repeat our pleas?"