Mentally Ill, and Excluded at the Border Re "Shameful Profiling of the Mentally Ill," by Andrew Solomon (Sunday Review, Dec. 8): So much has been done in this country to remove the stigma of mental illness. Why are we imposing this stigma arbitrarily at the border? The federal statute allows entry visas to be denied to people with mental illness just the same as we deny entry to drug smugglers and terrorists. There is no justification for these actions. Foreigners who were once treated for a mental illness pose no more of a threat than anyone already living in the United States. Mental illness does not categorically prevent individuals from being active, productive participants in society. This misguided border policy punishes people who have recognized a problem and received treatment. I fear that the policy will discourage some people from seeking treatment if they ever want to travel to or even through the United States. Mental health has made huge strides in recent decades, and President Obama has made a significant commitment to improve mental health awareness and treatment. This is a good policy that should be applied throughout the country, including along our borders. The writer, a psychiatrist, was the director of the National Institute of Mental Illness during the Carter and Reagan administrations and is the executive vice chairman of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. Andrew Solomon's article states that when a Canadian woman was denied medical clearance to enter the United States last month, it was "a swoop back into a period when any sign of mental illness was the basis for social exclusion." However, the old, bad kind of "social exclusion" is not at all what went on at the border. On the contrary, when signs of mental illness are recognized without stigma, it will become as acceptable to recognize them as it is to recognize signs of any other disorder, and to get treatment. The border agent was right to require that a Department of Homeland Security doctor sign off on Ellen Richardson's medical clearance. The well-being of the person with mental illness is the central concern. BODIE MOREY Cambridge, Mass., Dec. 8, 2013 The writer is co-author of "The Family Intervention Guide to Mental Illness." Shame on us is right! "Shameful Profiling of the Mentally Ill" should read as our collective wake-up call. As a psychiatrist in private practice, I regularly encounter discrimination against the "mentally ill" that makes no sense. How about these examples from my own practice: college students who get expelled from campus housing after being hospitalized, or people denied life and disability insurance for seeking out talk therapy? Excluding Canadian citizens from crossing our border (for a vacation no less!) because of their mental illness history is an invasion of their mental health privacy. Thank you, Andrew Solomon, for shining a light on this issue.