For anyone who is interested...

Published: July 1, 1998
Marlboro Psychiatric Hospital closed today for good, 67 years after it opened and after three years of blistering opposition from unions whose members lost good jobs, from the families of some patients who worried that their loved ones would be hurt and from homeowners who did not want mentally ill people as neighbors.

It is the first big psychiatric hospital to be shut under the state`s three-year plan to move men and women with schizophrenia, manic depression, severe depression and other disorders out of big institutions, a process known as deinstitutionalization.

The last of the 800 patients once treated here were taken to new places a week ago. Some went to other state psychiatric hospitals and some to group homes, but most went to live on their own with a $450-a-month stipend and help from special teams that seek to prevent the kinds of crises that put the patients in hospitals in the first place.

Greg Roberts, the chief executive of Marlboro, said he was sad that his 17 years at the hospital were over, but not sad to see the patients removed from Marlboro`s 17 custodial ``cottages`` -- Tudor-style dormitories for as many as 55 patients each -- and sent to less institutional settings.

``This is the kind of place people were talking about when they said someone had been `put away,` `` Mr. Roberts said in the chaos of his former office, which was filled with cardboard boxes. ``For a long time, that`s what happened -- people were put here and all but forgotten.``

A small cemetery near Marlboro`s main gate remains as a reminder of the days when patients came to the hospital never to leave.

The closing of Marlboro leaves New Jersey with three big psychiatric hospitals: Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital near *********** in the north, Trenton Psychiatric Hospital in the center, and in the south, Ancora Psychiatric Hospital in Camden County, where Mr. Roberts will be the new chief. As part of deinstitutionalization, the state is also closing some of its seven developmental centers for mentally retarded patients in favor of group homes.

Carolyn Beauchamp, executive director of the Mental Health Association in New Jersey, said the closing of Marlboro was long overdue.

``For the most part, people go through the state hospitals rather quickly,`` Ms. Beauchamp said. ``They are stabilized, they got some care and they were moved out. But the people who were in Marlboro a long time really suffered the most -- they spent long periods of their lives locked away, not really learning anything new and getting just custodially cared for -- and there is really no excuse for that.``

But not everyone thinks today`s closing was for the best. The hospital`s staff of 1,400 people, most of them unionized dormitory workers called ``human services technicians,`` were faced with the choice of commuting to one of the remaining state psychiatric hospitals to keep their $30,000 a year jobs, or leaving.

Their unions accuse Gov. Christine Todd Whitman of favoring the closing of Marlboro to save money, although the Governor has promised that the $68 million it took to run Marlboro for a year will be spent on community-based care. Group homes are run by nonprofit, and nonunion, mental health groups.

``I blame Christie Whitman,`` said Delores Wheeler, who has worked as caregiver at Marlboro for 25 years, and who says she must now find a new job.

People living near group homes or proposed group homes also oppose the efforts to move patients out of institutions, said Ginger Mulligan, executive director of the Mental Health Association of Monmouth County. Although unconnected with hospital closings, the slayings of two children -- Megan Kanka, who was killed by a paroled sex offender and of Edward P. Werner, who officials say was strangled by a teen-ager with a history of psychiatric problems -- have increased opposition to deinstitutionalization.

The Division of Mental Health Services has suspended assignments of several Marlboro patients to a planned group home in Jackson Township, where Edward Werner was killed in September, for a ``cooling off period,`` a spokeswoman said.

Road trip for sure. I have located it on Google earth and it looks very interesting.

i dont know, the cops train in the buildings, and i have heard rumors of alarms like greystone throughout the cottages