Mentally Ill Hear the Slam of Budget Cuts : Health: Two houses that provided both shelter and family are out of money and closing their doors.

As her friends carried furniture out of the Golden Hill house that changed Becky Kolva’s life, she stood on the front porch and took a quivering drag on a cigarette.

“I’m having a hard time right now,” she said, fighting back tears. “This place helped me get back into the community.”

This place is the Chrysalis Center, a long-term residential care facility for the acutely mentally ill. For seven years, it provided home and family for people like Kolva, whose mental disorders had repeatedly left them alone, in psychiatric hospitals or on the street.

But Monday, despite its acknowledged success, the Chrysalis Center closed its doors, another victim of the state’s budget crisis. The closing, which follows the shutting down last week of the center’s sister facility, Casa Pacifica in Oceanside, leaves San Diego County without a single long-term residential treatment program for people with persistent mental disorders.

Both houses, which provided 24-hour care and counseling for their residents, were operated by the nonprofit Vista Hill Community Treatment Systems, which relied on funding from the County Board of Supervisors to pay for about 60% of the two houses’ operating costs.

The approximately $300,000 that Chrysalis Center and Casa Pacifica needed, however, couldn’t be found after the state severely cut mental health payments to the county. The Board of Supervisors decided in June that funding for the programs probably would have to go. Not until last month, however, did Vista Hill receive formal notice from the county that the two facilities would have 60 days to close.

Vista Hill officials, who also operate crisis facilities and outpatient clinics serving the mentally ill, say they understand and agree with the reasoning behind the cuts. Chrysalis Center had 12 beds and Casa Pacifica had 14, so it made sense for the county to take money away from them, rather than other county programs and services that serve hundreds of mentally ill people, they said.

“This isn’t a situation where we would blame the county,” said Hobie Hawthorne, Vista Hill’s executive director. “These are the programs that go next. You can’t cut the outpatient clinics.”

Still, those who came to live and rely upon the two houses will have a difficult struggle, said Neil Longo, Vista Hill’s chief administrative officer.

“You’re not only losing 26 beds, you’re losing the relationship these people had with the program,” Longo said. “What’s going to happen without these programs is that people are going to die, frankly. They will return to living in utter misery.”

For Becky Kolva, the Chrysalis Center was something to hold on to even after she graduated from its programs a year and a half ago and began living on her own. Like many other alumni, she returned almost every Saturday for back-yard barbecues and a chance to touch base with her extended family--the counselors and staff who gave her help and encouragement.

“I’ve always looked forward to those weekly events,” said Kolva, a recovering alcoholic who suffers from obsessive compulsive disorder, an illness that, if untreated, can leave her constantly washing her hands and endlessly counting objects in a room.

A 38-year-old mother who said she shares custody of a 12-year-old daughter, Kolva depends on state aid to pay for her apartment and living expenses. She said she plans to replace her Saturday visits to Chrysalis Center with volunteer work.

Kolva and other residents of Chrysalis Center and Casa Pacifica were referred to the facilities after they had gone through multiple stays in psychiatric hospitals and repeatedly failed at living on their own. Admitted usually for four to six months, residents were taught to keep taking their medication and to master the most basic skills of daily living. When they graduated, they were no longer overcome with terror by the thought of making their bed, cooking, cleaning and handling money.

By most indications, the program has been successful.

More than 200 mentally ill people have been referred to the two houses since they opened in 1985, said Hawthorne, Vista Hill’s executive director. And preliminary results of a recent study the agency conducted with UC San Diego researchers found that people who completed the program reduced their need for psychiatric hospitalization by 88%.

“I just wrote to them today expressing our regret in their closing,” said Steve Harmon, the county’s acting mental health director. “They certainly did provide high-quality services, there’s no question about that.”

Vista Hill does plan to reopen Casa Pacifica in a few weeks as a residential treatment center solely for military veterans with mental illnesses. Funding for the facility, to be named Pacific Quest, would be provided exclusively by the Veterans Administration. Some of the two houses’ clients who are veterans will stay there. Other clients, however, are being placed in private board-and-care homes and provided with case managers who will attempt to give them the attention they received at the two homes. A few other clients are being returned to their families.

The closing of Chrysalis Center stunned many of its clients. One former client, a schizophrenic, was so shaken that he returned to the house in the 1400 block of Fern Street on Monday afternoon in an out-of-control state, shouting and running around. The center’s staff said it had no choice but to call police to subdue him.

Tim T., a former client who graduated from the program and returned to work as a staff member, said many other clients will be struggling to maintain their lives with the center closed. “It’s going to be bad,” he said.

Tim, who asked that his last name not be used, is a 32-year-old schizophrenic who suffers from paranoid delusions. He came to the center two years ago. After he completed the program, the director asked him to stay and help others.

Without the program, he said, “I think I would have ended up in a hospital for a long, long time.”

Today, he is married, his wife is pregnant, and he has a few job prospects.

“I have a direction in my life that I never had before,” he said. “This place saved my life.”