Institution Has Seen Scandal and Triumph

It is a collection of 85 buildings that houses a storied past and an uncertain future.

There is a courtroom, a fire station, a laundry and a power plant. Nestled in the hills just outside Camarillo, it is at the same time a school, a hospital and a laboratory.

Camarillo State Hospital and Developmental Center has seen scandal and triumph, earned high marks from researchers and endured endless jokes about its residents.

In its early days, Camarillo State Hospital was more like an asylum, the last stop for social deviants and misfits unwilling or unable to cope with real world circumstances, workers there say.

When it opened in 1936, 410 psychiatric patients arrived by train from other overcrowded California sanitariums. More than 7,000 patients lived there in the late 1950s.

Like most state mental institutions, electric-shock therapy was the norm. Sometimes, psychiatrists used cold sheets to calm excited patients.

Today there are fewer than 900 patients at Camarillo State Hospital. They represent a mixture of developmentally disabled patients and those afflicted with schizophrenia and other diseases of the mind.

And Gov. Pete Wilson is expected to announce plans to shut it down.

“That would be a tragedy,” said Kathleen Payne, president of the Ventura County Alliance for the Mentally Ill.

“It was the one place where they have locked facilities for those mentally ill patients who were completely out of control,” she said. “It was one place to make sure a particular drug was working to treat schizophrenia.”

For more than 20 years, Camarillo State Hospital has hosted a nationally respected research project aimed at treating mental illness--the Clinical Research Center for Schizophrenia & Psychiatric Rehabilitation run by UCLA professor Robert Liberman.

But with dwindling resources and fewer developmentally disabled patients, budget-minded state officials are looking to consolidate.

“The staff that are at Camarillo are excellent,” said Stephen Mayberg, the state mental health director who is pondering a plan to add more mentally ill criminals to the hospital to beef up its dropping patient load and save it from closure.

“It’s a great resource,” Mayberg said. “[Wilson’s recommendation] is unfortunate.”

From inside its Spanish-style clinics, dormitories and offices, mental-health professionals have conducted some of the most watched research into psychological illnesses anywhere.

Psychiatrists there cured a man who heard voices telling him he was the Antichrist. He now credits his doctors for allowing him to think clearly and live independently.

They treated the legendary jazz great Charlie “Bird” Parker, who landed in the hospital after a violent outburst in the 1950s. Parker later composed a song about his experience, “Relaxin’ at Camarillo.”

The prospect of shutting it down does not make sense to many mental-health advocates.

“Camarillo has a very good research department,” said Irene King, another member of the local chapter of the Alliance for the Mentally Ill who values the work done at Camarillo State.

“Doctors there have come up with many new and different ideas about treating mental illness,” she said. “And they have developed some of the most important new drugs used to treat schizophrenia.”