greystone park psychiatric hospital

Troubled center for mentally ill will be closed in New Jersey

By Robert Hanley

April 29, 2000 - New York Times

 

An aging New Jersey psychiatric hospital long criticized as substandard and recently plagued by a rash of escapes and assaults on patients will be closed over the next three years, state officials announced yesterday.

As she ordered the start of the shutdown, Gov. Christine Todd Whitman said in a statement that the institution -- the Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in Parsippany, the largest center for the mentally ill run by the state -- was perceived as a danger by its neighbors in Morris County, did not operate in the ''therapeutic best interests'' of its 613 patients and ''does not fit the model of modern psychiatric care.''

State officials said some patients would be transferred to smaller treatment centers or group homes around northern New Jersey, while others would be housed in a smaller psychiatric hospital to be built somewhere in the six counties Greystone serves.

In the meantime, officials said, more staff members would be hired and money appropriated to improve the Greystone buildings.

Mrs. Whitman acted after a spate of problems came to light in recent weeks, adding to Greystone's legacy as a sprawling, unwieldy center. Built in 1876, the hospital has been criticized over the last quarter-century by state judges and lawmakers as offering less than ideal care to its mentally ill patients.

Last month, a monitoring committee set up by state courts in 1977 in response to complaints about care and conditions denounced the hospital anew, saying that its environment, in the physical and psychological sense, ''strains the meaning of humane.'' During three unannounced visits, committee investigators found some patients sitting idle in day rooms without lamps, reading materials or games. Others slept on floors.

Some had no access to soap or toilet paper, and 44 more had to share four toilets because other toilets were broken.

This week, a 21-year-old male patient was charged with sexually assaulting a 19-year-old female patient, and a dozen hospital workers were disciplined by hospital administrators for failing to report a patient's suicide attempt a year ago. Earlier this month, four other workers were charged with assault for illegally placing a patient in restraints.

And last year, more than 40 patients escaped from Greystone simply by walking off its parklike 750-acre campus. They included a paroled rapist who had been committed by a judge who classified him as a dangerous sexual predator.

Governor Whitman made no mention of these incidents yesterday. But the institution's troubled history was acknowledged by the head of the state's Department of Human Services, Michele K. Guhl, and Greystone's chief executive, Michael Greenstein.

Ms. Guhl called the hospital a dinosaur that had been an ''intractable problem'' in the state's psychiatric system for 20 years.

She rejected calls by some Democrats in the State Legislature, including Senator Richard J. Codey, whose district is served by Greystone, that she dismiss Mr. Greenstein, saying she doubted that a new administrator could correct the hospital's problems.

Mr. Greenstein's five predecessors had been unable to reverse Greystone's troubles, Ms. Guhl pointed out. The hospital, she said, is just too big and too old.

''No one today would go out and build a 500-bed psychiatric hospital,'' she said at a news conference in Trenton. ''It's not the state of the art. Sometimes, to be quite candid, the accumulated weight of things that occur make you think: 'Let's think more boldly. Let's make lemonade out of lemons.' ''

Mr. Greenstein, the hospital's administrator, said the hospital's size increased problems, including difficulties in communicating with nurses and ward workers and in keeping track of all patients at all times. About 150 of its roughly 600 patients have some sort of criminal background.

The closing will take two to three years, Ms. Guhl said, because state mental health experts must determine where to place Greystone's patients.

 

In the interim, 41 new workers will be added to its current staff of 1,140, including 14 nurses and 12 paraprofessionals who will oversee patient wards. The state will also spend $4 million to improve Greystone's electrical and heating systems and upgrade its bathrooms. (The state already pays nearly $100,000 a year to care for each patient at the hospital, which has an annual budget of $58 million.)

Over the longer term, Ms. Guhl said, her staff will begin planning for construction of a smaller inpatient hospital for Greystone patients too ill or disabled to be transferred to smaller treatment centers or group homes.

Officials said yesterday that they were uncertain whether the new hospital would be built on the Greystone campus.

Although Ms. Guhl had told state legislators this month that the state planned to spend $50 million to $80 million for a new building at Greystone, she declined to speculate yesterday about the cost of a new hospital.

Shutting Greystone forces Ms. Guhl's staff to find suitable smaller regional and neighborhood residential homes for psychiatric patients no longer ill enough to require long-term inpatient hospitalization. In recent months, state judges have found that 750 of the 2,000 patients in the state's six psychiatric hospitals, including Greystone, no longer meet the legal standard for involuntary commitment.

Governor Whitman and Ms. Guhl said little yesterday about the availability of smaller treatment centers for the 750 psychiatric patients deemed eligible for transfers. Mrs. Whitman instructed Ms. Guhl to conduct new assessments of the 750 to confirm the judges' evaluations. For now, only 44 Greystone patients will be transferred, 20 to a Bergen County mental health hospital in Paramus and 24 to a state psychiatric hospital in Trenton, Mr. Greenstein said.

Both those assessments and the governor's order heartened one of Greystone's staunchest critics, New Jersey Protection and Advocacy Inc., a nonprofit group that a generation ago complained about care at Greystone and prompted state courts to set up the monitoring committee in 1977.

''The hope is that the state will use this to look at the whole service-delivery system,'' said Joseph Young, the advocacy group's deputy director.

But another major foe of Greystone, Senator Codey, criticized the shutdown order and renewed his appeals to reform care at Greystone by increasing the pay and educational requirements of the staff.

''This is no solution for the patients,'' Senator Codey said of the closing. ''It's not about the building; it's about the care in the building.''

Merchants near the hospital said the hospital's closing would have little effect on their businesses, athough Natalie Wallach, a real estate broker at Coldwell Banker, said the shutdown could help home sales. ''When I did show the area, there were people concerned about the safety factor,'' she said.

State officials said they were not sure what would be done with the land after the hospital was closed.

 

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