Category: Good Government On The March, Politics || By

I have a friend who works at a group home for the severely mentally ill. They're mostly former patients of Western Center, the state-run psychiatric hospital in Cecil Township that closed for good in 2000. For reasons you can guess, I'm not going to identify this person in any way.

My friend has been after me for sometime to write an "expose" on the private health-care company that runs the group home. I try to tell my friend that if no one wants to go on the record or cooperate, an expose becomes difficult if not impossible. And any sources who would cooperate could face legal repercussions.

Nevertheless, I've heard some stories that would curl my hair, if I had any left. The patients in my friend's group home are not functional adults who can participate in meaningful, mainstream activities. They have extreme emotional and developmental problems.

So when the state announced it plans to close Mayview State Hospital, I emailed my friend. "What do you think?" I said.

"Oh, (expletive), they'll be sending them down here," my friend replied. "I'll probably end up with Richard Baumhammers." Well, no. Baumhammers, a former lawyer who went on a racism-fueled shooting rampage in 2000, was eventually ruled competent to stand trial and is now on death row.

. . .

But Baumhammers was marginally successful at navigating society, at least until his internal demons drove him to a deadly burst of violence. My tongue is only partly in my cheek when I say someone like Baumhammers would be an improvement over the patients in my friend's group home:

• One patient eats his own excrement.



• Another can't be exposed to strange people; he attacks them without provocation. (This, as you might expect, makes it hard for them to hire new staff.)



• Another has to wear a football helmet everywhere for his own protection, because he is prone to banging his head against the wall.

You might think that a group home environment at least allows them to participate in some outside activities that they didn't have access to at Western Center. You might be wrong. Most of the patients spend their days medicated, watching TV. If my friend can wrangle the company's van for a day trip, he takes them to Wal-Mart to walk around and have ice cream.

A few patients more highly socialized and more functional are allowed limited excursions on their own. One recently was sent on a day trip to Niagara Falls. My friend asked him what he liked best. "I had cake," he replied.

The company for which my friend works hires "aides" who work for little more than minimum wage, and have minimum training. Few have any background in social work, nursing or some related field; they quit as soon as they find a better-paying job.

About 9,000 people are now in these group homes in Pennsylvania. A report by then-auditor general Bob Casey Jr. sharply criticized the level of care and the Department of Public Welfare's response to the problems, calling it an "abomination."

. . .

Now, the Rendell administration, DPW and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania want to dump more of these patients into group homes.

This obviously isn't helping the patients. It's not doing anything for the communities where the group homes are located.

The only people that are being enriched by the closing of state hospitals are those who operate group homes ... and developers who are salivating at the thought of buying the 335-acre Mayview property.

After all, Southpointe, the very successful commercial and residential development in Washington County, was built on the former Western Center property. And the "Kilbuck landslide" was the result of an attempt to build a shopping center on the former Dixmont State Hospital property.

My friend, who's fairly conservative, objects to the cost of maintaining a network of group homes and sending patients on outings at taxpayer's expense when, he says, they don't get any benefit.

The tax expense doesn't bother me if patients receive better care in group homes than in state-run mental health facilities. But group homes are clearly just warehouses. How is that an improvement over the services provided by Mayview or Western Center?

. . .

The movement to close mental hospitals developed in the 1960s and '70s after stories of abusive treatment became endemic. And a lot of people had been committed to mental hospitals who weren't disturbed at all --- people with Down's syndrome or clinical depression, for instance. They should never had been locked away. They deserved a chance to participate in society.

But there is clearly a small group of people who require 24-hour monitoring and professional care. The patients who remain in state hospitals are not bad people, but they are not capable of normal adult activities on any level.

In 2000, the family of a patient at Polk Center sued when the state tried to move her into a group home. A psychiatric evaluation determined the woman had an IQ of 14 and the mental age of a 25-month-old child. Workers at the group home were making $6.31 per hour and had no training in skilled nursing.

Washington County Commissioner Bracken Burns told the Observer-Reporter last week that he supports the rights of the mentally handicapped to live in the community. "I also recognize there are some individuals who are so severely mentally handicapped that they are not safe members of that community," he says.

I can't possibly argue with that. Neither would my friend.

. . .

Former senator and vice president Hubert Humphrey said the quality of a society "is measured by how it treats those in the dawn of life, in the dusk of life. and most importantly in the shadow of life."

We're not doing a very good job treating people at the "dawn of life":

• Pennsylvania has long been in the bottom-half of the nation in terms of infant mortality rates.



• Speaking of infant mortality, between 1990 and 2004 we went from No. 30 in the nation to No. 27 ... a three-point climb in 14 years is nothing to be proud of.



• The number of children in poverty in Pennsylvania also puts us in the bottom-half of the nation.

By closing facilities like Mayview, we're doing wrong by people in the "shadows" of life, too.

The only ones left getting a fair shake in Pennsylvania are those in the "dusk" of life, our senior citizens. I guess it's no surprise that they're the people who vote in this state.

Still, instead of coming up with new marketing slogans every 10 months, I'd like to see our local and state governments spend more time caring for the least of our society and less time trying to line the pockets of campaign contributors.

And although it's not a federal issue, where does Bob Casey Jr. stand on this problem today? Surely a U.S. senator would have a bully pulpit to advocate for Mayview patients.

Maybe if we improved the "quality" of Pennsylvania society, we wouldn't need to market ourselves quite so vigorously --- and unsuccessfully.

So, who will be the first political leader to demonstrate some leadership on the Mayview situation?