New Psychiatric Center Combines Security and Patient Freedom

After years of locks that wouldn’t hold, windows that wouldn’t latch, and fences too low to keep patients in, county officials and medical specialists swung open the computerized doors of the new Hillmont Psychiatric Center on Wednesday.

Short of a computer meltdown, no one will slip out of this building.

“In the old facility, doors are open, and people can just walk out,” said Nannette Boley, who has worked at the inpatient acute care clinic for 23 years. “If you were a patient, I’d have to stick to you to keep you from getting out. Now patients will have a lot more freedom to move around inside.”

The pink stucco fortress on the corner of Loma Vista and Hillmont, next to the Ventura County Medical Center, took six years of planning and a year to build. Patients will move in Oct. 12.

The seemingly escape-proof structure gives powerful testimony to how security and the philosophy of caring for the mentally ill have evolved over the last three decades.

The new building boasts a state-of-the-art security system: Red electric eyes beside every door prevent anyone but staff equipped with special cards from entering.

Other features include 14- to 20-foot stone walls that would be a challenge to a rock climber, anti-bacterial rugs, unbreakable mirrors to see the corners of rooms, double-paned glass, sound surveillance, and TV cameras on doors.

Carpets and walls are of teal and rose, colors to soothe frazzled nerves. Music can be piped into the rooms. Furniture is heavy to prevent throwing, and pictures cannot be pried from the walls.

“Some of these rooms are really luxurious,” said Irving Bessen, who helped direct visitors through the building for an open house Wednesday. “It makes you want to sign up.”

Not all are pleased with the new center. Kelly Gene of the local Alliance for the Mentally Ill said the building represents an old style of treatment that focuses on locking up patients rather than therapy.

The old acute-care center just up Hillmont Street was built in 1967 and is an open campus--patients are free to wander out the front door. The center was never designed to handle the most serious patients; they went to state mental hospitals.

Over the years, as patients in the county unit grew more disturbed and dangerous, fences grew taller, and mesh screens were placed on the windows. Still, patients often went AWOL, employees say. Several escaped and killed themselves.

When a mentally ill patient sneaked out of the nearby county hospital and stabbed a 90-year-old neighbor to death a few years ago, citizens in the area began to fear for their safety.

The new psychiatric center is about four times as large as the old one, and patients are given much more privacy and space. Patients are housed five to 10 in a room in the older 37-bed facility, but there will be a maximum of two per room in the new 45-bed unit.

Former patients, too, were consulted in designing the new building. Robert Barr of SHARE--Self Help Advocacy Resource Encouragement--suggested that the new building give patients more privacy, and give them plenty of space to pace off their agitation. He is happy with what he sees, but said that the building can’t solve all the problems.

“Looks are great,” he said, padding down a teal carpet. “It just depends on how they set up the procedures.”

Early Wednesday morning, before most doctors got to work, a few members of the Alliance for the Mentally Ill were out taping a huge banner to the center’s front railing. The banner, which was torn down before visitors arrived for the opening ceremony, read: “This building represents civil and uncivilized treatment of the mentally ill. There’s no healing in this place you call a hospital,” Gene said.

Gene says the activists will have another demonstration in several days.

In the past, the center has been plagued by complaints and lawsuits from patients, their families and neighbors.

But today, neighbors seemed complacent.

“Two or three [patients] came through my yard over the years,” said Alicia Tarin. “But I never felt threatened.”

Her daughter, Grace Daniel, said she felt safer with the new, high-security building.

“That one guy who escaped and killed that lady could have been prevented with better security,” she said. “But that’s something that happens once in 50 years.”