Life has never been easy for Scott. The Chicago teenager has long suffered from periods of deep depression and fits of uncontrollable rage. His working-class parents couldn’t afford private care for him. So when Scott needed hospitalization last year, he ended up at Henry Horner Children’s Center, at 4201 N. Oak Park, the largest public mental-health facility for children and adolescents in the state, and a hospice of last resort for the poor, the parentless, and the underinsured. Scott spent nearly a year there, and his memories of Horner are like open wounds.
The food at Horner, Scott says, was often greasy and occasionally seasoned with dead fruit flies or human hairs. Crumbs and crushed milk cartons littered the dayroom, and the bathrooms stank of urine. Feces smeared on the bathroom walls would sometimes remain there for days.
In many ways Horner itself is a victim of abuse and neglect. The facility–opened with such optimism 16 years ago–stands today as a case history of the devastating impact of politics on the ability of a state-run hospital to operate therapeutically. Encoded in that history is a blueprint for reform of the way the mentally ill are treated in Illinois. Because in the final analysis, Horner is just the tip of the iceberg. Many consider the facility and its problems to be only the most blatant example of the systematic dismantling of the state mental-health-care system under the 14-year stewardship of Governor Jim Thompson.
Both Davidson and Belletire were tenacious in their pursuit of reform. But they approached it in vastly different ways, which would seem to indicate differences in how Hartigan and Edgar would deal with a mental-health-care system in crisis.
In design Horner is more like a summer camp than a psychiatric hospital. One cluster of oversized cottages houses eight inpatient treatment units. Other buildings contain a swimming pool, a gym, classrooms, activity rooms, and administrative offices. The bedrooms on the units are designed for communal sleeping, and the nurse’s stations are tucked discreetly away from the hubs of patient activity.
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A cadre of administrators oversaw the activities of each professional discipline. These “discipline chiefs” recruited, supervised, and evaluated staff, and coordinated regular in-service training sessions. They also monitored a steady flow of interns from the local professional schools, which increased the level of patient care while creating a ready supply of new recruits.
A DMH task-force report from 1978 revealed a dozen staff vacancies and overcrowding on all but two of the inpatient units. Staff morale was low and the turnover rate was high, according to the report. And the patients saw Horner more as a “place to live” than a source of treatment.
