Parents Fear Closure of Camarillo Hospital

Many are deaf, unable to speak and incapable of maintaining their balance.

When visitors arrive, one patient at Camarillo State Hospital makes bird noises, jumping up and down excitedly. Another has to wear a helmet in the shower to keep from cracking his head.

Some patients have lived inside Camarillo’s sun-bleached masonry walls for decades. They don’t worry about Gov. Pete Wilson’s call to dismantle the institution and send many of them to community-based group homes by the end of 1997.

But their parents are frantic.

“I pray every night that he’ll be OK,” said Marcia Flannery, whose 56-year-old son has lived at Camarillo since the early 1960s. “This is all he knows.”

In accordance with a suit settled in 1994 requiring the state to reduce the number of mentally retarded people living in hospital settings over five years, the state has already decided to close a facility in Stockton and move its residents.

About 400 other residents must leave Fairview Developmental Center in Costa Mesa for group homes, their own apartments, foster care or with conservators. About 200 already have left Fairview; 100 were moved out in the last year.

Now Wilson wants to drastically cut--if not altogether eliminate--the services provided at Camarillo.

Proponents of the changes point out that some patients--many of whom have spent most of their lives in mental institutions--have found a whole new world to explore and enjoy in the community. They say that in spite of caring, competent staff, Camarillo and Fairview are still institutions. Group homes, they contend, are more like real homes.

“My son is very happy now that he’s in a group home, and he was never happy at Fairview,” Eleanor Kenny of El Cajon said of her son Roger.

But relatives of some Fairview residents see the movement to shrink the population in mental institutions as a threat to services vital to their loved ones. About 1,000 have formed a support group, Family and Friends of Fairview.

Relatives of many residents at Camarillo feel the same way, fearing that the state eventually will close all developmental centers and push everyone into community facilities where services will not be adequate.

Family members and advocates for some mentally ill have hired a Sacramento lobbyist to persuade legislators not to close Camarillo. Although they have launched a letter-writing campaign to state legislators, they believe that the consultant will give them a louder voice.

“The lobbyist is there in Sacramento, so she knows the legislators who are pro- and anti-[Camarillo State Hospital],” said Lita Biejo, president of a group called Families and Advocates for the Mentally Ill. “Once we know who is who, we can develop a strategy and get people who have influence with them.”

State officials say that even if hospitals are closed, no residents who require 24-hour care will be forced into group homes. Nonetheless, many parents say their adult offspring are being steered toward community-based living.

A few parents already have found residential care for their developmentally disabled children. But most have not even begun looking, and they worry about what they will find when they do.

For the first time in more than 30 years, counselors suggested to Flannery recently that her son is well enough to live in a group home. She says she tried group homes before, but they never worked out.

“I’ve had some horrible experiences with my son in community homes,” she said. “That’s why, when he had the chance to go to the state institution, he was very happy.”

The 1994 class-action settlement, brought by Protection and Advocacy Inc., was never meant to center on the question of developmental centers versus group homes, legal advocates say. Instead, the suit contended that clients in such facilities were unable to choose community-based living because California had neither provided enough residences nor ensured proper care in those that did exist.

The idea was to design a living situation most suitable to an individual’s needs.

“What’s really important is that it’s not just that people are moving out of developmental centers, but the whole process of planning for people. . . . We wanted it to be about appropriate living arrangements for everyone,” said Ellen Goldblatt, the attorney handling the settlement.

At Camarillo, the fate of the 400 or so mentally ill patients is unclear, but there is talk of keeping them there by bringing in more mentally ill to justify the continued operation as a psychiatric facility.

Many of the mentally ill have been referred to the hospital by family members, who have watched the patients become dangerous to themselves or others. Others are criminals who have been declared incompetent to stand trial, found not guilty by reason of insanity or determined to be mentally disordered offenders requiring treatment and round-the-clock observation.

“Their crimes can range from defrauding an innkeeper or public nuisance to murder,” said state mental health director Stephen Mayberg.

Within the mentally ill group are a few children who are wards of the state, most of them suffering severe behavioral disorders from abuse inflicted on them by their own parents.

Dee Press is a teacher whose concerns are typical of those who work with the children.

“The relationships these kids have made here and the trust that they’ve built are difficult to replace,” said Press.

If the hospital is closed, “I can only hope that they are able to be placed with people who are as skilled and committed as we are,” she said. “A lot of inappropriate and negative behavior would escalate before the new relationships get built.”

But the crisis is felt most strongly by those involved with the 500 developmentally disabled at Camarillo, patients who suffer from severe brain defects and are unable to care for themselves.

Some of Camarillo’s developmentally disabled would be sent to other institutions for 24-hour care, but most would end up at community-based facilities--smaller homes where programs and care are not as closely regulated as at state hospitals and developmental centers.

The community homes cost as little as $40,000 per patient a year, about one-third of what it costs to treat a patient at Camarillo.

“They’ve already made overtures with us to try and find a community placement,” said Gene West, an Oxnard retiree who has watched his 33-year-old son lapse into violent seizures.

“Patrick has some medical problems that have to be closely monitored by physicians and psychiatrists,” West said. “The staff at those homes are less trained and lower paid. Some of them are just like mom-and-pop operations.”

There is plenty of room at other state institutions for court-ordered patients if Camarillo is shut down. But for families of patients outside the criminal justice system, the move can seem inappropriate, or inadequate.

“My brother John is mentally retarded with cerebral palsy and behavior problems,” Alexine Wells told a group of Fairview relatives. “If John were to come into your house, first he would rearrange the room, and if we were to discipline him, he would proceed to break up the furniture . . .

“I love my brother as much as myself, but when I bring him home for Christmas it takes four adult people 24 hours a day to handle him. Do they have that in a group home?”

Flannery visited her son in a home once, “and the children were all in a pen. They actually put food in a trough like they were feeding animals.”

Flannery plans to tour homes and other state hospitals for new living quarters for her son. It took Jim Kester months to find a new spot for his 42-year-old developmentally disabled son.

“Unless you get lucky and find a home with experienced people, you’re going to have more problems outside than there are inside,” said Kester, whose son left Camarillo State for a small home in Oxnard last month.

“I’m not against putting a child in the community if you can find something equal to or better than what they have right now,” Kester said. “But there’s a certain percentage that will never be able to go.”