John F. Kennedy had it right. With a network of deep and wide community support, we could move most of the patients in mental hospitals and release them to community programs (“The broken covenant’’). The dollars would follow the patient.

That’s where the system broke down. It was far too easy for elected leaders to cut an array of support programs.

I know this from painful experience, both professional and personal. For a dozen years, I directed a halfway house in Colorado for mentally ill young adults slipping toward hospitalization. Then, seeing how disjointed our mental health system was, I spearheaded reforms that coordinated services for people with mental illness and, later, for the homeless.

As a child, I lived with a lobotomized paranoid schizophrenic brother who muttered that I was a “vicious killer’’ whose “eyes can kill, eyes can kill.’’ As a parent, I cared for a child terrified by wolves in the swimming pool, bugs crawling up her arms, and legions of devils flying toward her. Hallucinations are real — and often cruel.

Violence involving mental illness generates headlines. But we’re more likely to find mentally ill people huddling in a corner, much more dangerous to themselves than they are to others.

In Massachusetts, with our disastrous policy choices, we’ve traded the shackles of institutions for the butcher knives wielded by people who aren’t getting the care they need. Unlike other illnesses, the sicker our mentally ill neighbors, parents, roommates, and colleagues are, the less likely they are to seek help. So the money we think we’re saving is spent on shelters, jails, and emergency rooms. But we can’t hide from this problem anymore. The spotlight is on us.

Swanee Hunt

Cambridge

The writer, a former US ambassador to Austria, is the Eleanor Roosevelt lecturer in public policy at Harvard University.