Elion Details Efforts for Mentally Ill

From the December 23, 2005 Williamsport Sun-Gazette:

In the 1970s, his actions helped change state laws: Lawyer recalls his fight to free people unjustly committed to mental hospitals

By MARK MARONEY

City attorney Robert B. Elion said he is proud to have been a part of the legal challenge that liberated thousands from state mental institutions.

Elion, now a partner with the law firm Elion, Wayne, Grieco, Carlucci, Shipman and Irwin contacted the Sun-Gazette after reading this news paper’s three-day series this week on the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill and their dealings with the legal system.

The series quoted officials who said the closing of mental hospitals has led to a corresponding rise in the number of mentally ill people in prisons. But Elion has a very different perspective.

In the 1970s, Elion was working for Susquehanna Legal Services in Bloomsburg when he joined David Ferleger of the Mental Patient Civil Liberties Project in Philadelphia to change what they considered the state’s unconstitutionally lax laws on committing people to mental institutions.

Before 1976, he said, virtually any one, dangerous or not, could be committed for virtually any reason at all.

“You could be an oddball and face being committed. If friends, relatives or a physician wanted to put you away, they could.”

Elion said he and Ferleger visited state mental institutions, where they saw people drugged on Thorazine.

“They were zombies,” he said.

“There was no rehabilitation going on. They were in warehouses and holding tanks for any one with bizarre behavior.”

State law at that time required those seeking committal to prove that the person in question was mentally ill and in need of care and treatment, he said. But the standards applied were loose at best.

Committal was permissible if someone exhibited bizarre behavior, if people spent money on someone their family didn’t approve of or any other number of flimsy reasons, Elion said.

“Once you were in the mental institution you couldn’t get out. There was no requirement to have individual cases reviewed periodically. Once you were in you were in forever.”

Patients who tried to get out, he said, would have psychiatrists claim they were faking sanity.

To show how bad the situation had become, Elion described a study done in the 1970s by Stanford University graduate students. The students faked mental illness, got themselves committed, then documented what they saw “on the inside.”

Despite being sane, the quickest any of the students could leave was two months, while the longest was in more than two years, he said.

“Once in it was like a lobster trap.”

From 1973 to 1976, Elion said, he often visited Danville State Hospital, where he got to know a man in his 70s named Clifford Goldy.

Goldy had been involuntarily confined since 1968. He had been a patient at the hospital on three earlier occasions, the first in 1961, Elion said.

In 1971, Goldy asked to leave the hospital, the attorney recalled. He had done nothing to endanger himself or others, either at the facility or during his visits home, doctors admitted.

However, Goldy’s son was able to keep his father committed, telling the Lycoming County court that his father’s psychiatrist believed his patient was not mentally competent enough to live in ordinary society.

But Clifford Gold’s only questionable behavior was to “bother” and “irritate” his family on home visits by talking about new plans for his business,” Elion said.

He and Ferlenger “thought the only constitutionally permissible grounds to incarcerate someone was to show someone was a danger to themselves or others,” Elion said.

They filed suit and took their case before a three-judge panel in Scranton. After listening to their evidence and what Elion characterized as “articulate and creative” witnesses, the judges issued a stay order in July 1976 preventing committals under the existing law.

Current law now states that individuals cannot be confined against their will in mental institutions unless the state proves they are dangers to themselves or others, as manifested by an objective act within the previous 30 days, Elion said.

“Plus,” he said, “there’s a periodic review, where they must recertify that the individual is a danger to himself or herself or others before continuing to be committed.

“We knew this was going to revolutionize the whole way that people with mental illness are treated,” Elion said. “We knew it would open up the gates of these mental health jails.

“We also knew there was a responsibility. We believed once the gates were opened up it would create halfway houses and that it was a more humane way to deal with these people.”

Elion said he is glad people who would have been in mental hospitals are out in society, thanks to his efforts.

“At least many of them are in halfway houses and functioning. When we decided to challenge the constitutionality of this act, we knew it was going to result in thousands of people in mental insti