Budget Cuts Isolate Retarded Adults and Families : Massachusetts: State-funded residential care for retarded adults ends when they turn 22. The patients go home to unprepared families and an uncertain future.

By LESLIE DREYFOUS

March 25, 1990 12 AM PT

ASSOCIATED PRESS

BROCKTON, Mass. — Sometimes, Mary Freeland looks at her son and remembers the kid who used to coast his bike down Colonel Bell Drive to the whoops of the neighborhood gang.

But then she looks again and reality crashes in: It’s two decades later, and he still is that child.

It’s two decades later, and Freeland is back to being a full-time mother, six years after she placed her son in a school for the mentally retarded and began a new life. The state has run out of money and Patrick Reardon, along with hundreds of other adults like him, has been sent home.

“I’m a grandmother,” said Freeland, whose eldest daughter, Molly, has a son. “And I’m raising a child I’ll be raising forever, starting all over again.”

Similar situations affect more than 63,000 families nationwide, the U.S. Assn. for Retarded Citizens says.

The future is frightening and uncertain. Everyone--even Patrick--knows he needs to return to the kind of structured environment he was forced to leave when he reached the cutoff age of 22 last June.

In his pale, unlined face, the family sees Patrick’s anger at the separation from the residential school where friends and a rigid routine kept him in balance.

In his seizures and increasing violence, they witness utter despair.

Lately, Patrick more frequently refuses to walk and instead folds his body into a wheelchair, deflated as much by loneliness as by his trembling and calcified joints. Over the New Year’s weekend, he threw himself down a flight of steps. A few weeks later, he did it again.

“We’re watching him become more and more passive and slow. He’s not the Patrick I first met eight years ago,” said Stephen Freeland, who combined his two children with Mary’s five when they married in 1984.

These people are fighters. They have coped with Patrick and another retarded child--Mary’s 24-year-old daughter, who is under state care, turned 22 before the cutoff requirement was in place.

Together, Mary and Stephen Freeland have weathered divorce, beaten alcoholism, overcome depression and made ends meet. They held on after the suicide five years ago of Mary’s eldest son, who would now be 25.

But watching this second son, a poster child for a mental health organization in 1974, collapse into depression and destructive outbursts has been too much to bear.

“I’ve lost one son already. I can’t sit by and watch while I lose another,” said Mary Freeland, 49. She divorced Patrick’s father a decade before he died in 1988.

The Freelands have written letters to newspaper editors and lobbied representatives, but it looks unlikely that the state will place Patrick in the supervised group home his family feels he needs.

In Massachusetts, about 595 mentally retarded adults are at home who under healthier fiscal circumstances would be provided residential care, said Maureen Sullivan of the state Department of Mental Retardation. Another 989 people are on day-care waiting lists, she said.

Parents and activists have taken their cases to the Massachusetts courts, but haven’t been able to force the state’s hand.

The state’s budget crisis forced the freeze on funding for mentally retarded adults, and strong anti-tax sentiments have stalled efforts to reverse the situation, said Philip Johnston, Massachusetts secretary of human services.

“Patrick is falling apart because he’s not getting what he needs, and I’m beginning to lose control because nothing is normal anymore,” Mary Freeland said.

Nothing is normal. Family members are drawn into Patrick’s quirky world and, although they are wise to his attempts at manipulation, it’s hard to deny him the routine he relied on when under professional care.

“Patrick gets things in his head, the way he wants things done and when. He wants only certain people to get him up in the morning and if they don’t, he won’t budge,” said Stephen Freeland, whose 15-year-old son, Shane, usually is the alarm clock of choice.

Shane’s job is to roust Patrick from bed and start him dressing while his father hunts down a razor and prepares for the ritual, painstaking shave. Mary must be sure she has the exact cereal brand and flavor of juice for her son, who won’t eat otherwise.

After school, 18-year-old Cathy often leaves her friends to go home and keep an eye on Patrick, who spends hours in his upstairs bedroom writing random names hundreds of times or endlessly listening to the taped voices of friends lost when he left the Cardinal Cushing School.

Mary is trying to launch an insurance business and Stephen is struggling to sell real estate despite the slumping local market. But their thoughts never stray far from Patrick, who spends part of the week at a day-care center.

This balancing act takes its toll.

“My son told me yesterday: ‘I need you to stay home with me and be here,’ ” Mary said, her voice cracking. “And I know I should. I know he’s right. But I’ve got to work and I just can’t care for a 6-foot-tall man 24 hours a day.”

Stephen, a steady realist who shares with Mary a cockeyed humor amid the tragic and absurd, picks up a lot of the slack. But even this sturdy, bearded man has met his match in Patrick.

“Sometimes I feel like taking a plane out of here . . . but I love the family. I wouldn’t want to be alone,” said Stephen, a veteran who was briefly homeless when he returned from Vietnam.

Alcoholics Anonymous has helped the Freelands deal with drinking problems, but they are on their own when it comes to the pressures of life with Patrick.

“Support groups and outreach programs would help, but we’re barely able to give the basic services,” said Colleen Turner, a spokeswoman for the Assn. for Retarded Citizens’ state chapter. “These families are isolated and alone.”

On some of the toughest days, Mary crawls into bed and buries herself in the sheets. She closes her eyes and tries to block everything out, but Patrick is still down the hall and his pain still comes first.

So Mary pulls herself back together.

“People say I’m a survivor, and I guess I am,” she said. “But how do you survive this insanity? How do you watch your child drifting away?”