Jason Walsh: Plans for SDC begin to unsheath

“This drawn out torture over which part of you lives is very hard to take/ To cure you they must kill you – the sword of Damocles above your head” – Lou Reed, “The Sword of Damocles”

The residents of the Sonoma Developmental Center have been living under their own sword of Damocles since 2015, when state officials decided that the dwindling populations of California’s three remaining developmental centers were out of whack with the costs of running them – and announced the facilities would cease operating in 2018.

Just how soon the state would be able to shutter the institutional behemoths and find suitable residential services for its then-more than a thousand residents was as unpredictable as Cicero’s legendary cutlass which dangled above the throne of Dionysius by a single hair of a horse’s tail.

But the sword has since grown heavier above the SDC – that much was clear last week when it was announced that the state Department of Developmental Services was planning to set aside $2.5 million annually to establish a “healthcare hub” in Sonoma County to provide health and dental services for the developmentally disabled who will be transitioned out of the 125-year-old Eldridge facility in the year after next.

That the DDS was mapping out a plan to care for the county’s most needy once they lose their longtime home was met with cautious enthusiasm by the families and loved ones of the SDC residents – though the flicker of hope that a portion of Developmental Center would be set aside for continued operations in Eldridge was doused once and for all.

As DDS officials say – and the vast majority of health practitioners would agree – traditional developmental centers simply don’t jibe with the 21st century model of community-based residential quarters for people with special needs. The Sonoma Developmental Center, as the storyline goes, is an outmoded institution of a bygone era.

California’s system of vast public institutions for the “mentally disadvantaged,” as they were called, was launched in 1853 with the establishment of the Insane Asylum of California at Stockton, a place described by one San Francisco Examiner reporter at the time as “wild beasts confined in a menagerie.” Based on that model, SDC was established at its current location in Eldridge in 1891, when it was known as the California Home for the Care and Training of Feeble-Minded Children and housed the physically and mentally disabled, not to mention epileptics and “psychopathic delinquents.”

But 19th- and early-20th-century visions of forced sterilizations, frontal lobotomies and “Dr. Caligari”-like bedlam were long gone by the time the DS system was at its peak in the late 1960s (“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” notwithstanding), when it served more than 13,000 residents across the state, with thousands more on the waiting list. Developmental services were modernizing, as was evident in the Lanterman Act passed in the 1970s, which guaranteed persons with developmental disabilities the same legal rights as all Americans and tasked developmental centers with advocating for and protecting those rights. It ushered the way toward an attitude of independence and normalcy around the developmentally disabled – a paradigm that promoted community living and, ultimately… the downfall of developmental centers.

What’s heartbreaking for these final SDC residents isn’t that they’ve been left “institutionalized” the longest – it’s that, because of their particular challenges, they’ve needed the developmental center the most.

The DDS doesn’t yet know to where the SDC residents will relocate; real estate is pricey in these parts. Nor do they know what healthcare facilities will become part of the county “healthcare hub,” or network, of service providers for the developmentally disabled. So much still hangs in the balance.

As to the concept of absorbing the center’s residents into the larger Sonoma County community – it remains to be seen what that will exactly look like. Shared homes housing a handful of individuals, with 24-hour care, in various communities throughout the county, is a possible scenario. It’s likely the most adaptable have already left SDC. The site’s current 320 residents have been, in many cases, its more vulnerable – heavily dependent on direct and immediate assistance.

If the true measure of a civilization is the way it cares for its helpless members, as Pearl Buck eloquently said, then the measure of Sonoma County will be for all to see during the transition from SDC, whose soon-to-be-former residents deserve every ounce of dignity, respect and gentle kindnesses their lives can afford. Whether that can be found more easily enmeshed among the general community than at a stately campus dedicated to that proposition is no sure thing.

But what now seems certain is that the SDC residents will be moved to new homes somewhere to be determined, with health services provided by something to be determined, and cared for – dearly, one hopes – by someone to be determined.

The future is uncertain and the clock is ticking.

The sword twists precariously; its blade is sharp.

Email Jason at jason.walsh@sonomanews.com.