Parents and Patients Face Turbulent Transition

CAMARILLO — One by one, the final days are slipping away at Camarillo State Hospital, each pushing the aging sanctuary and its community of patients and employees closer to the end.

Already, the signs of change are everywhere. Hundreds of workers have left the mental hospital, taking jobs at prisons and other institutions as part of an exodus of state employees that will continue until the facility empties out sometime this spring or summer.

Others, such as 50-year-old psychiatric technician Edward Tait of Ventura, have sunk deep roots in the area and will probably retire when the hospital closes rather than abandon family and friends.

The facility itself is folding up unit by unit, with offices packed up and wards shut down as patients and employees move on.

Psychologist Robert Kern is among the discarded, having put in eight years at a world-renowned research unit dedicated to battling schizophrenia and other disorders. He and other members of the research team boxed up their belongings and moved to the Veterans Affairs Hospital in West Los Angeles when their unit went dark late last year.

Then there are the patients, nearly 700 mentally ill and developmentally disabled people, many of whom have lived at Camarillo State for years or even decades.

With time running out on the 60-year-old hospital, they and their parents face the most turbulent transition of all. Some parents hang on to a thread of hope that at least a portion of the institution will be set aside as a treatment center for patients with local families.

But most also have joined an 11th-hour scramble to find new homes for their loved ones, bowing to the reality that the end is near and the clock is ticking.

“We’re still struggling with this,” said Gene West of Oxnard, who met for the first time Friday with hospital officials to discuss where his 33-year-old developmentally disabled son, Patrick, will end up after a decade at Camarillo.

“We just feel like we’ve been fighting an uphill battle all the way,” he added. “I don’t think people realize how much this place means to us and to the community.”

Indeed, Camarillo State Hospital has been a community within the community, tied to Ventura County in many ways.

Opened in 1936, the mental hospital has been around since before the city of Camarillo itself was incorporated.

At its peak in the 1950s, the facility housed nearly 7,300 patients and provided thousands of jobs for local residents. Even today, with the patient population dwindling to 700 and the number of jobs shrinking to about 1,400, it continues to pump millions of dollars a year into the Ventura County economy.

Clearly, this was not just some local hospital.

Jazz great Charlie “Bird” Parker spent time there, composing “Relaxin’ at Camarillo” after an outburst of violence earned him admission in the ‘50s.

It was one of the preeminent mental institutions in the nation, boasting groundbreaking research programs, including one that led to widespread acceptance of the generation of drugs now used in treating schizophrenia.

“This facility has been a gold star facility in mental health,” said Tait, a 14-year employee. “We have worldwide famous programs out here. It’s just amazing to me that politics and money are going to close this place down.”

In the end, what finally closed down Camarillo State Hospital was a complex tangle of issues.

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The closure reflects a nationwide trend toward community care programs rather than the mass warehousing of patients in hospitals and institutions.

It also reflects a change in California policy--spurred by a class-action lawsuit--that required a sharp reduction of patients in the state’s developmental centers and forced the spending of millions of dollars more for services for those who live outside hospitals.

Finally, it reflects Camarillo State’s dwindling patient population and the high costs of caring for state hospital patients, about $114,000 a year per patient at the Camarillo facility.

Citing those factors, Gov. Pete Wilson a year ago ordered the shuttering of the hospital by July 1. And he delivered the knockout blow earlier this month when he released his preliminary budget, which included only $3.4 million to maintain the facility’s grounds and buildings for up to a year after everyone leaves.

With the end in sight, much excitement has been stirred by efforts underway to transform the sprawling hospital campus and its red-tiled, Spanish-style buildings into Ventura County’s first public university.

But for those with the greatest investment in Camarillo State--for this tight-knit community of patients and parents, battered and beleaguered now by a losing fight to keep the place open--that possibility is of little comfort.

For them, this is a time of great uncertainty. They remain dazed and resigned, as if reeling from a crushing blow.

“The public has bought into the university and it’s kind of like a stampede,” said Leo O’Hearn, a retired lawyer who moved from Northridge to Hollywood Beach in Oxnard to be close to his schizophrenic son, Steven. “I supported the university, but I really do believe we are entitled to a piece of that.”

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O’Hearn is typical of many parents. Two decades ago, he showed up at the sprawling campus looking for a place that could help pluck his son from a world of delusion and hallucination.

At Camarillo, Steven responded well to a new drug administered by doctors at the hospital’s research center. Just as important, he found a real home, a community of towering trees and gentle hills where he could take walks in safety and seclusion.

But that is changing now. The decision to close the hospital has uncorked a new reality. O’Hearn can either find a community care home for Steven or allow him to be placed in a state hospital in Norwalk, 80 miles away.

“It’s a very serious problem,” he said. “We are both 70 years old, my wife and I. It’s bad enough thinking about the future without having to start all over again.”

O’Hearn is among those clinging to the hope that at least a portion of the property will be used to treat those patients with families in the immediate area.

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When a gubernatorial task force last year endorsed a plan to convert the hospital into a Cal State campus, it also recommended that the governor explore the treatment center concept.

Seizing on the idea, Ventura County Supervisor John K. Flynn pitched a plan to treat patients with families in Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties at the children’s center, a 66-bed facility on a remote corner of the hospital campus.

So far there has been no response. But last week Flynn vowed to resurrect the idea, saying he would seek the support of his fellow supervisors in coming weeks to press the issue with state legislators and the governor.

“It saddens me to see what’s happening out there,” Flynn said. “There have to be people in our community, hopefully a lot of people, who are willing to support those who cannot speak for themselves.”

Short of an agreement for a local treatment facility, members of the Green Line Parents Group--a nonprofit agency dedicated to supporting the patients at Camarillo State--are considering legal action to prevent clients with local families from being moved long distances.

Group spokesman John Chase, whose developmentally disabled daughter was admitted to the hospital in 1962, said he has visited about a dozen community homes from Santa Clarita to Ventura but has not found a suitable facility.

Many other parents feel the same way, Chase said. Moreover, they worry that moving their children out of the area will impose an undue hardship and perhaps reverse the progress they have made.

“Under the federal civil rights code, people with developmental disabilities are supposed to be treated with courtesy and concern,” Chase said. “Uprooting people from their homes, and sending them distances that in some cases are going to be 100 to 200 miles away from their families, is not looked at as satisfactorily complying with federal law.”

Though the issue remains unresolved, the Camarillo State community is adjusting to the changes as they unfold.

As it stands, patient transfers are expected to start in earnest in March or April. At the same time, employees are also considering their options. Many want to follow their clients, transferring with them to other facilities to ease the transition and maintain the quality of care.

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Others are looking for work elsewhere, firing off resumes and applications with the help of a job search center launched in July on the hospital grounds.

Last week, Camarillo resident Gwendolyn Johnson used one of the center’s computers to surf the Internet, checking out job openings across the state.

There were other job search tools as well. A bulletin board on one wall holds 16 clipboards, thick with job opportunities in fields ranging from nursing to biotechnology.

A rack of out-of-town newspapers allows workers to scan the classifieds and real estate listings. Booklets and pamphlets are available on everything from resume writing to surviving a layoff to the art of interviewing.

Johnson said she is considering work with the state Department of Social Services, either up north or in the Inland Empire. After 14 years at Camarillo, she said she is ready to move on.

“I hadn’t really planned on staying out here this long,” said Johnson, 50. “I feel pretty good about the new adventure. But it’s also kind of sad. If you’ve been out here as long as we’ve been out here, it’s kind of like leaving home.”

In fact, the exodus of state employees has been going on for months now. Offices have been cleared, personal belongings boxed up and carted away. Already, 340 workers have left since March. Going-away parties have become routine.

Some units have been hit so hard by departures that retirees and staff from other facilities have been brought in to help keep things running.

Leticia Avila, who worked with autistic children at the mental hospital, found a job late last year as a psychiatric technician at Richard J. Donovan state prison in San Diego.

She put in eight years at Camarillo. She said her unit closed a month after she left, its clients shipped to a developmental center in Costa Mesa.

“It’s sad,” said Avila, a 35-year-old Santa Paula native. “But in a way, it’s kind of our fault as employees for not getting more involved in the community when we first heard it might close.”

For the patients, parents and employees at Camarillo State, the threat of closure was nothing new. Over the years, advocates for the hospital had beaten back efforts to close the facility or convert it to another use, including two attempts in the 1980s to turn it into a prison.

But always before, the hospital’s good work and stellar reputation had helped defeat those efforts.

This was a facility that had conducted some of the most important research in the world on mental illness and other disorders, including performing the critical tests in the 1950s that led to the groundbreaking treatments for schizophrenia.

In more recent years, in partnership with the UCLA Neurological Institute, Camarillo researchers continued that work while branching out into other fields, including controversial studies of the factors contributing to increased left-handedness among the mentally ill and retarded.

“Over the years, there has been just an incredible amount of work done by that hospital,” said Dr. Robert Kern, the psychologist in the clinical research unit.

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The loss of Camarillo State, however, is a blow to those research efforts, officials said. And it’s a blow to the patients at the mental hospital and elsewhere.

“It was a loss of something very special,” said Dr. Michael Green of Newbury Park, a UCLA researcher who spent a dozen years at Camarillo. “When you lose this site to conduct research, it’s a problem not only for patients in Southern California, it’s a problem for the patients who are in a position to most benefit from new developments.”

To hear some parents tell it, the greatest benefit is just having their children nearby. Rose Zachowski started as a registered nurse at the hospital in 1972 and was eventually able to transfer her developmentally disabled son, Patrick, from Porterville to Camarillo.

She put in 15 years at the hospital, retiring in 1987. Now, recently widowed and 74 years old, the Oxnard woman faces the prospect of having to travel to Costa Mesa to visit her son, who turned 43 on New Year’s Day.

“When my husband was still alive, we used to pick him up every Saturday and we’d keep him all day,” she said. “Now it’s once every two weeks, and soon I may not be able to see him that often. And it’s going to be hard on him too. He knows all the roads to turn on when we’re coming home, and if I turn the wrong way he just says, ‘No.’

“There are many reasons why this facility should continue. I absolutely do not understand why this is happening.”

Gene West thinks he understands. While the state hospital is precious to those who know it, at a distance it remained a curiosity if not an oddity, a secretive place set apart and misunderstood by the larger community.

“It’s kind of out of sight, out of mind,” said West, who on Friday decided to move his son to a small group home in the area by the end of the month, rather than see him move away.

“I keep saying if people were told that hundreds of residents were going to be moved out of the city of Camarillo so a university could move in, they’d be up in arms,” he added. “But I think they look at us and think, ‘It’s not my problem.’ ”

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About This Series

Over the coming months, one of the most famous institutions in Ventura County will wind to a close. “A Community Says Goodbye: The Closing of Camarillo State Hospital” is an occasional series chronicling the final days of the mental hospital, one of the preeminent institutions in the nation. This first installment focuses on patients, parents and employees as they decide where to go when the hospital closes.