Psychiatric Hospitals

State officials are again looking at closing one of the state's three major Baltimore-area psychiatric hospitals, and 90-year-old Crownsville Hospital Center has emerged as an early target. Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. released a capital improvement budget last month that would delay funding for the construction of a new Crownsville hospital until 2007. State health officials as high-ranking as the interim director for the Mental Hygiene Administration had expected the project to be funded in the fiscal year that begins July 1. Also, a state budget analysis given to local legislators recommends closing the north Anne Arundel County hospital and moving its patients to other facilities across the state.

Dr. Yasmin N. Roberts, a clinical psychologist on the staff of a nonprofit psychiatric hospital in Massachusetts, died of pancreatic cancer Monday at her parents' Guilford home. She was 37. Dr. Roberts was born in Baltimore and raised in Guilford, graduating from Friends School in 1983. She earned a bachelor's degree in anthropology from Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, in 1987. After college, she took a job as a mental health care worker at Cambridge Hospital in Cambridge, Mass., and "while working with an underclass of Haitian women" there, "she found her clear calling as a psychologist," said her father, Dr. Paul F. Roberts, a Baltimore psychiatrist and psychoanalyst.

BEIJING - The world's leading psychiatric association voted yesterday to send a delegation of experts to China to look into charges that Chinese psychiatric hospitals are being used to silence political and religious dissidents. Officials of the World Psychiatric Association, which is meeting in Yokohama, Japan, said that Chinese health officials had been cooperative. A preliminary fact-gathering delegation is scheduled to travel to China next spring. But the resolution fell far short of steps proposed by human rights advocates and some psychiatrists, who insist that systematic psychiatric abuses in China are rampant, perhaps even more severe and widespread than they were in the former Soviet Union.

Sheppard Pratt Health System will take over financially troubled Taylor Manor Hospital, the two hospitals announced yesterday. Taylor Manor, a 94-year-old hospital in Ellicott City that has been operated since 1939 by the Taylor family, has been saying for two years that financial problems might lead to its closing. "It's a weight being lifted," said Dr. Bruce Taylor, chief executive and medical director of Taylor Manor and the third generation of Taylors to head the institution. "This gives us assurance that we can continue what our family has worked on."

In its colorful brochures, the new University Village apartment complex in Towson boasts everything today's college student could want: ethernet access, a heated swimming pool, saunas, tanning beds, a gym and a game room. But the complex's brochures make no mention of its most striking feature: an up-close view of a world-renowned psychiatric hospital. In one of the more unusual examples of a trend toward privately owned student dormitories, Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital is leasing land for the construction of University Village, a 615-resident apartment complex for students from adjacent Towson University and other area colleges.

Sheppard Pratt Health System announced yesterday an ambitious $80 million plan to build an addition and renovate two aging wings at its hospital, all as part of a strategy to cement the system's reputation as a premier provider of inpatient psychiatric care. The project, which will add 165,000 square feet of hospital space and replace 196 beds, is the latest in a series of moves at the 111-year-old campus on North Charles Street as it responds to changes in the mental health industry. Officials said yesterday that the new wing will bring the hospital - whose patients are housed in a building dating to 1891 - into the 21st century.

Facing $1.6 million in budget cuts, Crownsville Hospital Center officials said yesterday that the hospital might have to reduce mental health services to comply with state-required cost reductions. The cuts -- nearly 5 percent of its $33 million operating budget -- are on top of other cost-cutting measures that went into effect this year at the 90-year-old state psychiatric hospital. "With these cuts we have nothing else to pull from," Ronald R.J. Hendler, superintendent of Crownsville, said yesterday at a meeting of the hospital's Citizen Advisory Board.

Confronting $1.6 million in budget cuts, Crownsville Hospital Center officials said yesterday that the hospital might have to reduce mental health services to comply with state-required cost reductions. The cuts - nearly 5 percent of its $33 million operating budget - are on top of other cost-cutting measures that went into effect this year at the 90-year-old state psychiatric hospital. "With these cuts we have nothing else to pull from," Ronald R.J. Hendler, superintendent of Crownsville, said yesterday at a meeting of the hospital's Citizen Advisory Board.

A Westminster man accused of attempted murder in an exchange of gunfire with state troopers last month has been ordered held without bond and transferred to the state's maximum-security psychiatric hospital, officials said. Earl W. Delker Jr., 38, of the first block of Wimert Ave. had been hospitalized at Maryland Shock Trauma Center with wounds in the right arm and torso. On Tuesday, he was served with warrants alleging 31 crimes, including multiple counts of attempted first-degree murder and assault.