I would like to respond to the OP-ED in last week’s Hartford Courant by Robert K. Killian Jr., Hartford’s probate judge.  In “The Half-Truth about the Dangerously Mentally Ill” Judge Killian brings up many interesting and thorny issues regarding mental illness, danger, freedom, and public protection, but there is another issue that runs tangential to these. It is the fact that in our mental health system the insurance companies have made it nearly impossible to help people in hospitals at all. The days allowed in the hospital have been so seriously limited that patients are usually discharged before receiving any sensible treatment. Not only are they discharged before medication has even had a chance to work, but time is so limited that the staff has almost no time to assess the patient’s overall psychosocial circumstances and, of course, cannot come up with a logical plan for the patient after these micro-stays. Thus, the revolving door for so many patients eventually leads to demoralization and deterioration amongst the chronically mentally ill which, in turn, often results in early death, violent behavior due to chronic instability, other crimes, incarceration and even suicide. These insurance limitations are not isolated to big private insurance conglomerates, but to public insurance, as well.

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