"This one's mine. This one's mine. This one's mine, too."
Richard Deem is hunched over a barrel in a back room at the Wishing Well Drop-In Center on Speer Boulevard, a kind of clubhouse for the mentally ill, where the salvaged belongings of former Highlands residents are stored. He soon fills three boxes with books and religious pamphlets, everything from Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces to Holy War, the inside story of the PTL scandal, and numerous textbooks and dictionaries--books he hasn't seen since he left Highlands a year ago, bound for Ridge Home.
Near the bottom of the barrel are stacks of yellowed apartment-rental guides for the Denver area. Deem starts to take them, then puts them back. "I don't need those anymore," he says.
It took Deem a year to reclaim his books, because he didn't have a ride to the drop-in center. It took him nine years to leave Highlands, even though he badly wanted to.
"I didn't like it there," he says. "It had a criminal element. They'd bum cigarettes, then they'd bum money. I was threatened a couple of times. I didn't like that."
Fifty-six years old, Deem is one of the success stories of the Highlands move. In fact, he was practically the poster boy for the event: Last January a Denver Post photo showed him sitting on his bed, his bags packed and ready to go. What the photo didn't show was that Deem had been packed up for a long time.
"I wanted to move out, but I didn't know where to go," he says. "I told Harold Harmer I was going to get a private apartment. He told me I wouldn't be able to come back. I accepted that. But I didn't know where to go to find an apartment."
Deem has been mentally ill for 34 years. He is matter-of-fact about the nervous breakdown he suffered as a young man while studying for the seminary in South Carolina, the subsequent diagnosis (manic depression and schizophrenia), the somewhat confusing journey afterward to shelters, then Highlands, Ridge Home--and now his own ground-floor apartment in Capitol Hill.
With the assistance of his mental-health case-management team, Deem has made a home for himself. His furniture consists of other people's castoffs, including a gray sofa set and card table he rescued from the trash. Bookcases anchor every wall of his living room. A row of business cards from his mental-health contacts is posted by the phone, should he ever need to call. Deem says he has no complaints.
He cooks his own meals, mostly TV dinners. His caseworker takes him shopping on Fridays and he attends group therapy on Wednesdays. Once in a while he strolls over to the Sun Cafe on Colfax for a meal or a glass of iced tea. One friend from Highlands lives upstairs in the same apartment house; another lives in the La Bonte boarding home a few blocks away.
For the most part, though, Deem stays in his apartment, locked away with his television, his radio and his books. Although the Goebel service plan states that "consumers with severe and persistent mental illness can obtain competitive jobs rapidly" and that work "is considered a form of mental-health treatment," he has no job, and the mental-health people aren't exactly pressuring him to find one. "I have a severe mental illness," he says. "I can't have a job."
Mainstreaming, in Deem's case, consists mostly of being left alone. "I watch television and listen to the radio," he says. "I don't get lonely. I like my privacy."
In many ways, Deem is among the most fortunate of all the Highlands refugees. His needs are few and they are easily met, because the Goebel funding has allowed the Mental Health Corporation to boost staffing ratios considerably. Previously, a dozen staff members served up to 450 clients, but the new community treatment teams assign 15 staff and a psychiatrist to 270 clients, and the new high-intensity treatment teams allot 12 staffers to 80 people. (The teams provide various services, including the vital supervision of medication; according to one study, three-fourths of outpatients with schizophrenia stop taking their antipsychotic drugs within two years of leaving a hospital or program.)
Unfortunately, the high-intensity teams are available to only a fraction of MHCD's clients. In fact, the entire Goebel settlement package is directed only at those persons receiving treatment for mental illness who lived in central and northwest Denver between 1981 and 1994--roughly half of the people the corporation has contracted to serve.
"We do have a concern that we're setting up two different systems of care here," says MHCD's Stockdill. "Half our clients are getting the Goebel services, and half aren't."
Stockdill says MHCD has developed various levels of new services for 1,100 Goebel clients over the first two years of the plan. He hopes to see the number rise to 1,450 in the third year, but full development of the team concept and accompanying job training programs may depend on securing funding over and above the millions of dollars mandated by the settlement.
"In the past, most mental-health programs had a goal of psychiatric stabilization, but that's just the beginning," Stockdill says. "There's a whole rehabilitation process that has to take place."
The proposed budget for the Goebel plan calls for staffing and administrative support well beyond what any boarding home could afford. For example, an eight-bed treatment facility for substance abusers would boast nine full-time staff at a daily cost of $148 per bed, excluding psychiatric services; supervised "congregate living" in apartments would have a daily bed rate of $63. But funding the new services is only part of the battle; an even greater challenge may be securing appropriate housing for the newly mainstreamed. The apartment market in Denver is tight; rents are up; and the availability of subsidized Section 8 housing (which allows clients like Deem to pay no more than 30 percent of their income on rent) continues to dwindle, with property managers reporting waiting lists of one to three years.
The city plans to distribute close to 100 Section 8 vouchers under the Goebel plan, but vouchers don't guarantee vacancies. Although the remaining mental-health clients at the large boarding homes are supposed to be moved by next July, "we still don't have places to put them," says Denver Social Services' Pring.
And while apartments are scarce, placement in the smaller group homes envisioned by the plan may be even tougher; Denver zoning requirements currently make it extremely difficult to establish such homes. MHCD has opened up two small residential treatment centers in the past few months, but one, an eight-bed facility for dual-diagnosis clients on Sherman Street, faced strong neighborhood opposition until the corporation agreed to allow only women to stay there. What mental-health professionals call "NIMBYism" (Not in My Back Yard) continues to dog the dispersed-housing plans.
"I think many of the Highlands people do feel that they're better off now," insists rights advocate Utash. "The issue isn't that they don't have that community anymore, but that they're in a community now that doesn't accept them."
All of which makes Deem part of an elite group. Many of his old acquaintances from Highlands are caught in the gap between the old board-and-care homes and the new services and housing yet to arrive. Some aren't ready for apartment life and may never be. For them, the closing of Highlands coupled with the absence of a suitable, smaller group home as replacement has put them in a kind of netherworld not found in any of Richard Deem's books.
Danny Wagoner finishes raking leaves and agrees to serve as tour guide of Decatur West, a board-and-care center only a few blocks from Highlands but less than a third of its size. Seven Highlands refugees now live here, and Wagoner manages to track most of them down in a matter of minutes.
There's a shy, thin, gray-haired woman who will not look you in the eye. There's a young man with curly black hair who sits in bed in the middle of the day writing what looks like a journal on a tiny yellow Post-it pad. There's Wagoner's roommate, Bob, a large, mutton-chopped man who seems startled by company and answers questions in cautious monosyllables.
Then there's Wagoner himself, an affable 43-year-old who is developmentally disabled but not, he points out, mentally ill. For twenty years he worked as a school custodian; he even had his own place. But the diabetes he lived with eventually caught up with him.
"He got to where he wouldn't take care of himself and wouldn't take his medicine," says Helen Wagoner, Danny's mother. "Twice I found him unconscious, and the doctor said he couldn't live alone anymore."
Wagoner spent two years at Highlands. He had his own room and the opportunity to earn a few dollars--doing dishes, raking leaves, picking up trash, laundry work. "The only bad thing was the cockroaches," he says.
Toward the end of his stay at Highlands, another resident punched Wagoner "for no reason" and gave him a concussion. If the place hadn't closed, his mother says, she would have moved him out anyway. He made a relatively soft landing at Decatur West, within walking distance of his old haunts.
"It's a good place," he says. "I know the 7-Eleven. I know the people there. I know the people at Shop-N-Save. I go down to the drop-in, the Wishing Well, and I can hang around there all day. I go to the library--it's right there."
Wagoner says the closing of Highlands upset some of his friends more than it did him, including a girlfriend who was "hurt pretty bad" by having to leave. But even for Wagoner, change has a price. At Highlands Wagoner paid $425 a month; at Decatur West he pays $750. His mother helps make up the difference.
It doesn't take a mental-health professional to figure out that as the size of boarding homes declines, the cost of providing care goes up. Many Highlands residents were barely getting by at Harmer's rates and cannot afford smaller board-and-care homes without substantial financial assistance. Yet some advocates of mainstreaming consider even a 33-bed facility such as Decatur West to be less-than-ideal placement.
"There's a philosophical split around how big is too big," says Pring. "Some people would say eight beds is too big. Some say fifteen. Most people agree that by the time you get over thirty, you've got a mini-institution."
Pring says the large boarding homes continue to "provide a critical service right now, because we don't have any other alternatives." But it's clear that most advocates for the mentally ill would like to see the rest of them go the way of Highlands.
"It depends on who's running the home," says Carol Staples, executive director of the Colorado Alliance for the Mentally Ill. "If they weren't in it for the money, and there was a little more quality control, and they had some case managers so they could get some activities that people wanted to do...but most of them are doing things as cheaply as they can."
Philip Valdez, operator of the La Bonte board-and-care home, bristles at such talk. "The people who were out to make money in this business got out a long time ago," says Valdez, whose father, Vernon, operates the Valdez boarding home. "Our residents come first."
Curiously, at the same time the city is trying to remove the mentally ill from large boarding homes, plans are in motion to turn the deserted Forum Building downtown into a 100-unit single-room-occupancy hotel for the homeless. It's not clear how many mental-health clients might end up there--Stockdill says the Forum "would never meet the Goebel requirements"--or how meals would be provided, but the proposal has Harmer and other boarding-home operators grumbling.
"The big gripe was that Highlands was too large," Harmer says. "I guess it's too large if Harold Harmer runs it, but not if the city runs it, huh?"
Danny Wagoner says he has no interest in moving around anymore. Technically, since he is a Social Services and not an MHCD client, he's not part of the target population slated for mainstreaming. But changes in the system that make boarding homes more expensive to operate affect him, too.
"Anyplace you go, you figure it's going to cost more," he says.
Winter Prather, a man whom architect Gio Ponti once called "a genius with a camera," sits on the porch at Decatur West, flipping through the pages of what remains of his publicity material. A flier from the early 1980s announces a Prather show at a Denver gallery; an article by a German critic appraises his reception in Europe--reminders that the residents of the board-and-care homes come from everywhere and nowhere.
Ponti commissioned Prather to document the 1971 opening of the Denver Art Museum, back in the days when Prather's going rate was $500 a day and his work was finding its way into museums and photography magazines around the world. But in the past two decades, Prather has had his share of setbacks--a dark tale involving a stolen Hasselblad camera, a home sold under market value in Taos, another on Champa Street that was "damned" and possibly condemned, and an indeterminate period of financial struggles and physical illness and moving from place to place. "I have to count backwards," he says. "What year is this?"
Prather, who is not a mental-health client, seems resigned to life in boarding homes, but that doesn't mean he likes it. "I wasted a year of my life at Highlands," he says. "There were a lot of nuts there." Decatur West is quieter and cleaner, but he laments the lack of a darkroom. Paying the rent takes virtually everything he has, and there are times when he wishes he'd never sold the place in Taos.
"What do you call those people, the ones who are worse than lawyers?" Prather asks. "Real estate agents. That's it. And then there's the ones that are even worse than that. Social workers."
Over at Valdez, Kay Robertson can't wait to take down the Christmas decorations. The holidays bring parties and gifts from well-meaning church groups, but they also stir up residents' memories of Christmas past--and expectations that relatives are coming to visit or take them home.
"This is the absolute worst time of year for our people," Robertson says. "We've had two fights, where the men got into it, and we ended up having to call the police. I never close the office doors, and we're patroling the halls constantly. I cannot wait to get this over with."
Since she started working at Valdez last April, Robertson has seen plenty of familiar faces from Highlands--some supposedly headed for apartment life, some bounced back to Valdez after a bad experience in the terra incognita of the street. "They're not supposed to be making referrals to Valdez anymore, but they do," she says. "They're putting them here with the intention of upsetting their lives and moving them again. And there are a lot of people who are refusing to leave."
MHCD's Stockdill says the Goebel plan is gradually reducing the number of mental-health clients at Valdez, from forty six months ago to about twenty today. Robertson disputes those numbers, saying the total is closer to sixty. "They're taking them out pretty quickly, but they're coming back," she says.
Nancy Younkerman, a former cook at Highlands who came to work at Valdez three days after Harmer's place closed, says many of her old customers have also surfaced at Transitions, the crisis center operated by MHCD upstairs from Valdez, where mental-health clients are often placed following a hospitalization or some other traumatic event. "I know, because I feed them," she says. "If I've seen one, I've seen fifty of them go through Transitions, these people they put in apartments." (Stockdill says that as of last May, eight Highlands residents had been sent to Transitions, primarily because boarding-home life "hadn't prepared them for independent living.")
Robertson oversees Valdez with seemingly inexhaustible matriarchal energy, gently praising good behavior and scolding troublemakers, doling out candy from a big dish in her office--one to a customer, please--and wrestling with the logistical challenge of establishing compatible living arrangements when the rooms have up to four beds and the vast majority of potential roommates are mentally ill. "We play room roulette constantly," she says.
Still, it's not hard to find residents who prefer Valdez to Highlands. "When I first got here, I felt like I was recovering from Highlands," says Sam Haigler. "It was very violent. The staff was violent, the people were violent. If you wanted to get into a fight, you had a thousand chances. I just kept out of it."
Haigler is 46 and has been mentally ill since 1975. He spent ten years at Highlands. His caseworker is talking to him now about smaller group homes, but he says he's not interested. He gets along with everybody at Valdez, even his roommate--a man who was about to be ejected from the home because nobody would room with him. Why change things?
Willie Mae Fears, 75, misses the "pretty good many friends" she lost when Highlands closed, but Valdez suits her just fine. Originally from Dallas, she's made the rounds of hospitals, nursing homes, single-room hotels and boarding homes for longer than she cares to remember. Moving again doesn't appeal to her. "I been in these places quite a long time," she says.
Others still hope for something better. Robert Appel, forty, talks about being on a Section 8 waiting list, about an apartment that "should be coming up" in a few more weeks. "I'm not going to live here with these people who just stay around and die," he says. "You see the same people, year after year, and they just die here. Dead bodies just don't turn me on."
Jerry Lucero says what's holding him back is not so much mental illness as poverty. True, he's been battling "schizophrenia and absentmindedness" since the early 1970s, but he had a job once, working in a restaurant in Adams County, and he knows he can do it again.
"I know I'm mentally ill now," he says, "and I want to get well first. But they seem to think I should be in Section 8 apartments or a boarding home or a nursing home. I don't agree. I don't think it cuts the mustard, man. I've got to be free. I've got to live a normal life. I can't keep on living with all sorts of people around me."
Robertson says the idea of mainstreaming the mentally ill is fine in theory, but she believes only a small number of "our people" are truly capable of making it on their own. There will always be a need for places like Valdez, she insists, to deal with the sickest and the poorest, the people nobody else wants. As she sees it, it's the mental-health community that's badly in need of a reality check.
She cites, for example, the case of another Valdez resident, a man who spent 23 years in the state hospital in Pueblo. A few months ago MHCD moved him into a Capitol Hill apartment. "They were going to prove that he could make it," she says. "And he was agreeable; he will do anything to make friends or please someone. The place they put him in, there were prostitutes sleeping in the laundry room. He was being propositioned by men and women. He'd invite people in, and they stole everything he had."
The man has since returned to Valdez. He says he remembers the apartment and that people took money from him. But he also remembers a mysterious phone call, a kidnapper who wanted a million dollars, which he paid, and a number of other events that seem far removed from the kind of quiet integration into the community called for under the Goebel plan.
Robertson says the man's condition is worse than when he left. But at least he landed back at Valdez. Other mentally ill people of Robertson's acquaintance, including several Highlands residents, have passed through the boarding homes and kept on going, through the widening holes in the safety net, to a fate unknown.
A few days before Christmas, a former Highlands resident stopped in at Valdez to say hello. He had been moved into an apartment, then evicted. He told Robertson he was living in a box behind a 7-Eleven on Federal Boulevard, just across the park from Highlands. A clerk at the store says she may have seen him rooting in the dumpster two weeks ago.
But then the new year dawned in snow and ice, and he was gone.
end of part 2
