Western State Hospital in Staunton will lay off 25 workers as part of nearly $2.5 million in budget cuts authorized by Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, hospital officials said Thursday.

When John Beghtol began work at Western State as the director of community services in 1977, the facility, built in the 1950s, housed 1,354 patients — many of whom lived out their lives there.

STAUNTON — Staunton officials said Wednesday that the new Western State Hospital will be built in the city’s Virginia Crossroads Business Park adjacent to the current hospital.

State orders César Chumil be moved to Northern Virginia, closer to his family

The state’s commissioner of mental health yesterday agreed to develop a plan to transfer a longtime mental patient who has been held in various forms of seclusion and restraint since 1986 in a state mental hospital.

The director of Western State Hospital has told a state oversight committee that he needs more time to work with a mental patient who’s been kept restrained or secluded for much of his 22 years in the hospital.

Group wants to give names to the numbers buried at Western State

By Bill McKelway, Media General News Service

A Western State Hospital mental patient who has been kept in seclusion or restraints for some 20 years was singled out a decade ago in federal investigations of the Staunton facility and in other reports on the hospital’s shortcomings.

A citizens’ board for Western State Hospital has determined that the facility has repeatedly violated the law for its treatment of a mentally ill patient who speaks little English.

Between the late 1700s and the 1970s, Virginia had a practice of institutionalizing handicapped populations that were inadequately served in Virginia localities. The commonwealth was an early state providing services for the mentally ill.

Western State Hospital officials are happy about this week’s inclusion of funding for a new facility in the state bond package.
While $110 million for a new Western State in Staunton was part of the passage of Wednesday’s $1.5 billion bond package by the General Assembly, it is not clear when bids will be taken and the facility built.