A Place Called Home

Jack Gardner ’59 helps the mentally ill find companionship, renewed purpose.

by Michelle Simmons

April 1, 2009

Members spruce up the walkways of Laurel House.

On any given morning, members begin arriving at Laurel House around 8 a.m. One of them turns on the radio. Another goes outside to sweep the walkway. Soon, nearly everyone is busy with a task: answering phones, watering the plants, planning lunch, dusting the built-in cabinets of the Sears Craftsman house. These everyday tasks may seem mundane, but for some of the members, they’re miraculous.

Thanks to the efforts of Jack Gardner ’59, the first clubhouse in New Jersey for people with severe, chronic mental illness opened in October. Laurel House helps its members find community, education, vocational training and, eventually, regular employment. It opened with 15 members meeting three days a week and grew to 25 in less than three months.

Membership is free, and individuals work on whatever tasks fit their skills or feel appropriate to them. “The emphasis is that this is a voluntary thing,” says Gardner, who chairs the board of directors. “When they come, they have a place of their own, a place they can take pride in.”

The concept developed more than 60 years ago, when four patients from a state mental hospital in New York formed a support group that they called a “club.” It became Fountain House in 1948 and has served as the model for new programs everywhere. The movement has expanded to more than 400 clubhouse programs in 24 countries. An organization formed in 1994, the International Center for Clubhouse Development, provides training and certification.

Gardner says that there had been attempts to start clubhouses in New Jersey, but because the mental-health system there focuses primarily on medical treatment and housing, little attention is paid to getting people accustomed to life’s daily routines.

“People get some of the services—housing, health care, access to medication—but they don’t really get much help in building a life,” he explains. “If you don’t have supports in place, really a direction or purpose for your life, chances are you’re going to relapse and go back into the system.”

Gardner intimately knows those obstacles: his only son, Jeremy, has struggled with severe mental illness since his early teens. For nearly 25 years, the family has navigated not only the ups and downs of his illness but a system that seemed interested only in medicating and institutionalizing him. Jeremy currently lives at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital, and everyone in the family anticipates the day he can join Laurel House.

“Right now we’re the only support network he’s got,” says Gardner. “This is why, for people like him, a clubhouse is so essential. It creates a family-like atmosphere where people care about you for who you are, not just as a statistic that no one wants to deal with.”

He points out that people with chronic mental illness have the lowest employment rate—less than 20 percent—among all those with disabilities, and he cites several factors, including the social stigma of mental illness and the difficulty of holding a job while in the throes of active disease.

The nature of mental illness often causes work-

history interruption, Gardner explains. “They have a ragged resum´e, and those gaps might be where they have to return to a hospital or just are unable to work. Recovery is not a linear thing—you can be making great strides and all of sudden something will happen, and you lose momentum.”

What gives Gardner hope is that Laurel House is a community effort. “We started off with a board of four or five people who were fully committed to making the clubhouse happen” and who used their network of contacts, he says.

He and the board members reached out to faith communities, mental-health organizations and foundations, and they’ve had a tremendous response. In addition to private donations, Laurel House has received grants from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Rutgers University Health Foundation, as well as the Middlesex County Board of Freeholders.

The board also found a great resource in Executive Director Tom Malamud, who had just retired from Fountain House after more than 40 years and remains deeply committed to the clubhouse concept.

“Serendipity really has been the name of the game for Laurel House ever since we started,” says Gardner.

Laurel House now is open five days a week, and Gardner looks forward to adding programs that Malamud developed while at Fountain House: one is a transitional-employment partnership with local businesses; the second is a member “reach-in” program to local psychiatric hospitals.

“It helps patients think of themselves not as patients but as members,” he says. “It gives them some hope and direction that there’s something waiting for them out there.”

For more information, visit www.laurelhousemiddlesex.org.