Columnist Jon Huer has apparently never accompanied a loved one in psychological crisis to an emergency room only to see them locked up involuntarily there for lack of a more appropriate walk-in crisis stabilization center. Perhaps he has also never lost someone to suicide or addiction, or sat beside a crying teenager at a rail station as she contemplates throwing herself in front of a passing train.

These things still happen, but because of organizations like Clinical & Support Options (CSO), the community supports exist so that those who would have been locked up like Rochester’s wife in “Jane Eyre” in the halcyon days to which Mr. Huer wishes to return per his column “Living in the Venus flytrap: Our downward mental spiral,” [Recorder, July 15], are able to find help.

The sprawling asylums of Long Island and some Massachusetts state mental hospitals lie abandoned because we have improved our ability to treat and reintegrate people with mental health issues into our communities. I know people who struggle with bipolar illness taking lithium, lamotrigine, carbamazepine or a combination who are now fully functional working parents and in one case has won awards for his community service and leadership.

Mr. Huer may know such people as well, perhaps without realizing it. Were I such a person, Mr. Huer is not someone with whom I’d be quick to share my secret.

Our mental health system continues to have plenty of problems, and those include some lazy and incompetent practitioners, unfortunately. But the DSM-5 is a genuine improvement on previous editions, and the people at the top of their game as diagnosticians have a great deal to offer those at wits’ end whose lives could take a turn for the worse or, with competent intervention, for the better.

Suicide hotlines by themselves are not enough; we need in-person crisis stabilization centers where assessments and referrals can be offered rather than forced on people — precisely the services CSO has brought to Greenfield.

Stephen Ditmore lives in South Deerfield.

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