by Karla Ciaglo
HARTFORD, CT — Two years after the sudden death of a Middletown legislator, his memory was at the center of a Mental Health and Wellness gathering at the State Capitol Tuesday.
“I came from a grieving community,”said state Rep. Kai Belton, D-Middletown, who won a special election to replace Rep. Quentin “Q” Williams following Williams’ death in a head-on collision with a wrong-way driver in 2023. “There was no better way to begin my legislative work than by creating space for healing, support, and connection. That’s how the wellness fair was born.”
Belton and other state lawmakers gathered Tuesday for the third annual Mental Health & Wellness Day, using the occasion to highlight a suite of legislative efforts and statewide initiatives aimed at expanding access to behavioral health care. The event, held in conjunction with Mental Health Awareness Month, also featured a wellness fair, where community organizations provided resources, interactive activities, and mental health advocacy tools.
Belton, a licensed clinical social worker, reflected on how her district’s collective grief following Williams’ death shaped her approach to public service and inspired the launch of the wellness fair.
Belton also spoke about House Bill 7214, a proposal she introduced to address systemic gaps in maternal mental health with, as she put it, “the urgency and the compassion that it deserves.”
The bill would require the Department of Public Health to study how hospitals integrate doulas into patient care and publish a statewide public report card on maternity services to improve outcomes and address racial and geographic disparities in maternal health.
Rep. Patrick Biggins, D-East Hartford, one of the legislature’s newest members, highlighted the recent passage ofHB 7158, which seeks to improve communication between health care providers and schools during psychiatric crises involving minors. The measure would allow safety plans to be transmitted to a student’s school, provided a parent or guardian consents, and require timely discharge planning when a child is released from inpatient care.
“It’s a step in the right direction,” Biggins said. “It’s not all we wanted, but it’s a step. Trying to get over the legal hurdles of hospitals communicating with schools is a challenge, and this bill does that.”
State Rep. Tammy Exum, D-West Hartford, who co-chairs the legislature’s Transforming Children’s Behavioral Health Policy and Planning Committee, emphasized the committee’s ongoing work to keep youth mental health at the forefront of policy discussions in the wake of the pandemic.
“My work has focused around children and youth behavioral health,” Exum said. “Coming out of COVID in 2022, we realized that our children were not okay. The pandemic may have ended, but the children’s mental health crisis had not.”
She recalled the unanimous passage of landmark mental health legislation in 2022 and stressed the importance of moving beyond bill signings to ensure those reforms take root.
“It’s not enough to pass legislation,” she said. “We have to make sure it’s implemented.”
That implementation, she emphasized, includes sustained funding for Connecticut’s three Urgent Crisis Centers, which she described as “incredibly effective but still in their infancy.”
Located at The Village for Families and Children in Hartford, Wellmore in Waterbury, and the Child and Family Agency of Southeastern Connecticut in New London, the centers offer a less traumatic alternative to emergency rooms for youth experiencing mental health crises, she said.
“They provide treatment in a setting that feels safer than a hospital ER,” Exum said. “Young people leave with a care plan and a pathway for follow-up.”
Fairfield Democrat Cristin McCarthy Vahey, who co-chairs the Public Health Committee, highlighted two key pieces of legislation under consideration this session, both aimed at addressing the intersection of mental health and addiction. One proposal would authorize the establishment of overdose prevention centers — facilities designed to reduce fatalities among individuals struggling with substance use disorders.
“These centers will help save lives,” McCarthy Vahey said. “They will provide a safe space where people can stay alive long enough to access support, treatment, and connection.”