By Courtland Milloy
Wednesday, November 19, 2008

You don't hear much about mentally ill people being locked in the attic by misguided relatives anymore. There are no "insane asylums" where patients go for counseling but end up getting a lobotomy instead. Words such as "warehouse," "snake pit" and "cuckoo's nest" are no longer used to describe most psychiatric hospitals.

And we can thank Woodley House, a halfway house for the mentally ill in Northwest Washington, for helping to pioneer much-needed reform. Founded by occupational therapist Joan M. Doniger in 1958, Woodley House is celebrating its 50th year as a provider of some of the most progressive community-based psychiatric services in the nation.

No small feat, especially when you consider that most Woodley House residents are black and poor. For Doniger, it was a battle against stigma upon stigma upon stigma.

"She'd travel around the city and the country advocating for community-based mental health treatment for low-income people instead of locking so many up in institutions," Irving Schneider, a psychiatrist who worked with Doniger, told me. Schneider, 83, was on the staff at D.C. General in 1958 and sent Woodley House its first resident -- a black woman who suffered from alcoholism and related psychoses.

"Back then, you couldn't have a black person living in Woodley Park," Schneider recalled. "Neighbors would make a big fuss, and Joan had to be very careful integrating the house. It took a lot of courage on her part."

Doniger died in 1972. She was standing near an intersection in New York when two cars collided, sending one of them careering toward her and her adopted daughter. Doniger managed to push the girl to safety, but she was struck and killed. She was 44.

The organization she founded continues to grow, providing mental health treatment to more than 300 residents a year. Woodley House also provides crisis care and emergency shelter along with residential treatment programs designed specifically for the homeless. (Go to http://www.woodleyhouse.orgfor information.)

The heart of the program is a long-term residential treatment program that operates out of a well-appointed, three-story townhouse duplex. The townhouse -- formerly called Woodley House, like the organization -- was renamed Valenti House in honor of the late Jack Valenti, who was president of the Motion Picture Association of America, and his wife, Margaret, both ardent supporters of Woodley House and unabashed advocates on behalf of the mentally ill.

"When I first came [to Valenti House], I was dirty and had a long, straggly beard and I couldn't take care of myself," Vernon Hayes, 48, who suffers from schizophrenia, wrote in a recent tribute to Woodley House. Today, he is enrolled in an independent-living program run by the organization, learning to cook, clean and do secretarial work.

"I think I am ready for more responsibility because here at Valenti House they have taught me how to monitor my medicine since I have diabetes, and also taught me time management. I am always on time now and I stay clean and so is my room."

But such accomplishments don't mean that the stigma of mental illness has been erased.

"My feeling about mental illness is that it's not a chic thing, not the kind of illness that people rally around and hold walkathons for," Ann Pincus, a member of the Woodley board, told me recently. "It's still largely hidden and makes people ashamed and afraid. It's not something that people want to have their name attached to."

In other words, not everybody has the boldness of a Joan Doniger or a Jack and Margaret Valenti.

But ignoring the problem won't make it go away.

"We're seeing an increase in demand for mental health services and in the intensity of the mental illnesses," said Gary Frye, executive director of Woodley House. "Part of the reason is that more people are returning from the war in Iraq in need of help."

The economic crisis is also resulting in a scarcity of jobs for the mentally ill, to say nothing about a slowdown in charitable donations.

"We can use single bedsheets, blankets, desks, tables, chairs, workout equipment, computers and, of course, money," Pincus said. Might as well throw in a Thanksgiving dinner, too. That's certainly not asking much for a half-century of helping the least, the lost and loneliest among us.

E-mail: milloyc@washpost.com