Dorothy Green's Two Sons Died... and insurance companies aren't helping

***Sensitive content from a client of Selah Carefarm***

My name is Dorothy Green and I have an adjustment disorder.  At least that is what my new grief therapist was required to tell the insurance company in order for them to cover my sessions with her. 

Let me tell you my story and you can decide for yourself because I really don’t feel disordered. 

I feel a lot of pain sometimes.  I cry a little some days and a lot other days.  Sometimes I am annoyed or grumpy or impatient or even angry much easier than usual and there are absolutely times when it is very difficult for me to pay attention to anything but the heartache that seeks to consume me but I still would never have labeled myself disordered.

In August of 2018, while I was working late on a Friday night, my 22-year-old son was being murdered by his spouse of only a year and a half.  Andrew had told him on Sunday that he had come to the conclusion that it was not a healthy relationship for him due to finding a tracking device on his cell phone and the constant jealousy and questioning about his whereabouts even when he was just out with friends or his twin sister.  He had finally had enough and was ready to call it quits.  The next day his husband went out and bought a sledge hammer at Home Depot and two days later he caved in Andrew’s head with it while he was sleeping. 

Needless to say, our entire family was shocked and traumatized by such an event.  I was able to get some short term counseling sessions through my work with a decent therapist but he didn’t have any expertise or training in traumatic grief of this magnitude.  Luckily, through a support group contact, Andrew’s twin sister, Sierra, and I found a safe space at Selah Carefarm, a special place that specializes in bereavement. We were able to find hope and help and a path toward not just survival but a way to continue living even though we would never be the same of course. 

We learned not to fight all the conflicting strong emotions that seemed to have a mind of their own and come out of nowhere at a moment’s notice but rather to acknowledge them and make room for them while continuing to engage in life at the same time.  We learned that joy and pain can indeed live side by side and often do for the bereaved.  We spent time with rescued animals who were content to just be with us without judgement or looks of pity in their eyes as we were so often met with by well-intended friends. 

We processed our grief through art and movement and time with nature.  We honored Andrew’s memory and shared stories about who he was and what he meant to us.  We built and tended a memorial garden.  We did our best to learn how to live again after experiencing the worst possible thing we could imagine – the death of our loved one.  This took time and hard work and lots and lots of tears. 

Fast forward to April of 2025, just three months ago. 

On another Friday night after I was done working at my second job, I arrived home to shockingly find my 36-year-old son, Sean, dead in the bathtub.  He was my only child who still lived at home. 

He had some chronic digestive issues and would often lay down in the bathtub with warm water showering down on his stomach to calm his pain and himself when it was hurting.  When he didn’t answer my call out to him and I opened the bathroom door, he was peacefully laying there in the bathtub with the shower still running as if he had just fallen asleep except that he was dead. 

No sign of foul play, no sign of an overdose or suicide, no sign of having fallen or trauma of any kind.  We are still awaiting the outcome of an autopsy that the medical examiner ordered with the sudden death of a seemingly relatively healthy 36-year-old man. 

As you can imagine, I was a wreck. 

Now, I was the mother of not one dead son, but two.  How is that even possible?  Am I cursed?  Just unlucky? 

The guilt and the what ifs and the "would’ve, should’ve, could’ves" begin to eat you alive.   I was immediately thrust back into the nightmare of traumatic grief and all that comes with it, not that it had ever completely left my side after the death of my younger son.  Within a few weeks, after all the relatives left and the memorial service had been held and the ashes picked up from the funeral home, I knew I was going to need some support again.  I had become very active with a support group for family members of murder victims and even serve on the local board for the organization but that wasn’t really going to help with processing the death of Sean. 

I began to seek out any leads I could find for a good grief therapist who took the medical insurance from my job.  It took weeks of searching through multiple different avenues to finally find someone with training in traumatic grief (a CBC provider), with an ability to take on a new client and who took my insurance. 

At the recent intake session, she was honest with me and let me know that in order to bill my insurance, she would need to submit a “diagnosis” and that the kindest and gentlest one to use was to say that I had an “adjustment disorder”. 

While I really like her and appreciated her honesty, it was a hard pill to swallow to be called “disordered” simply because I felt the need for some support and a safe place to process the overwhelming grief from having to live with the death of two of my children.  It’s not like I was sitting in a corner of a dark room doing nothing but sobbing all day (not that there would have been anything wrong with that if that was where I was at the time after what I had endured).  Why must I have a disorder in order to receive help?  Why must anyone? 

I feel like the mental health system compounds my suffering and that of other grieving parents by making it seem as if there is something profoundly wrong with us if we take more than the allotted five days of bereavement to come to terms with the death of our loved ones. Our grieving, even at its hardest moments, is a natural, deeply personal and unique response to our devastating loss. It does not benefit us or help us cope with our losses to be labeled or judged or regarding as “disordered”. In fact, it adds to our trauma when we are made to feel as if there is something wrong with us or when our grief doesn’t fit someone else’s preconceived notion of what is a “normal” process or period of time to grieve.

There is no reason for us to have a system that requires my grief to fit into some category or diagnosis of being disordered in order for the insurance company to provide for the supportive care that I need. Part of my identity and my reality now is that I am the mother of two dead children and I need that reality to be witnessed and honored not treated like it is an illness to be diagnosed.

Like millions of Americans, I watched the devastating news regarding the fatal floods in Texas recently. I hope with all of my heart that those parents and family members who must now face a life without their beautiful daughters and other family members never have to bear the extra burden of a label like adjustment disorder in order to receive care and professional support after already needing to figure out how to bear the unbearable death of their precious children. 

None of us, no matter how we are coping deserve to have that added insult to the injury we are already suffering

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From Dr. Jo:

Dorothy, I couldn’t agree more—and I thank you for speaking truth in a system designed to silence the truth. The current "mental health" framework serves the interests of powerful corporations, not grievers. It demands false, pathologizing language—forcing us to label what is natural and both human and nonhuman (think of all the nonhuman animals who also experience and express grief) as “disordered” in order to access care. That is not only dishonest; it is harmful. Grieving people need supportive care and insurers should be providing that care without requiring a 'noble lie.'

We urgently need a courageous and compassionate federal legislator to confront this. What must change? First, compel insurance companies to cover truly supportive counseling—care that isn’t predicated on diagnostic lies. And let’s abolish the arbitrary 50-minute session limit, which fails entirely in the context of traumatic grief. The illusion of efficiency has replaced genuine helping.

It’s time to stop pandering to the greed and self-interest of an often exploitative insurance industry. It’s time to center care around the people who are suffering—not the profits of those whose bank accounts benefit from their grief and suffering.

Dorothy and her other children remembering Andy and Sean