The end of Madison: designation, sale, and closure

2010 — 2012

The center ended in three documented steps: The first was the designation. Effective at 5 p.m. on 24 September 2010, by mutual agreement announced on 7 September, Oaklawn Psychiatric Center of Elkhart County assumed the state-required duties of the designated Community Mental Health Center for St. Joseph County from Madison Center; the managed-care provider contract between the state and Madison was terminated simultaneously with Oaklawn's new agreement, Oaklawn leased space at Madison to continue the community-based services, and the announcement stated expressly that inpatient services at Madison were not affected by the change. The second step took the wards. In March 2011 Memorial Hospital purchased the inpatient assets of Madison Center, adding approximately ninety beds and beginning inpatient psychiatry for adult and pediatric patients in a new Memorial Epworth Center on the Niles Avenue ground — the county's inpatient psychiatry passing from the independent center of 1949 into the general hospital of 1894, whose system's later boilerplate states the result: the Epworth operation is St. Joseph County's only inpatient behavioral health facility.

The third step is the organization's own end, and the record carries it at two sizes, printed as they stand. The county's historical timeline of its county home, recording the change as it fell on Portage Manor, states under 2012: "Madison Center closed due to financial strain," with inpatient needs absorbed by Memorial Epworth as the primary and outpatient services assumed by Oaklawn. This history's Hospitals record, working from the directories of the years after, carries Madison's outpatient and children's services as continuing at its Madison Street and Niles Avenue addresses at directory size. The two accounts are not averaged here: the designation, the wards, and the name are gone by the documents; what, if anything, of the corporation's outpatient shell outlasted 2012 in the directories is a question the sources reached leave at that size. The Notre Dame partnership the 2010 announcement pledged to continue belonged to the inpatient base, and passes out of this record with it. What the county had built since 1949 — public psychiatry as a standalone nonprofit — was, by the end of 2012, a hospital department and another county's contract.

Sources:

1. Madison Center / Oaklawn Psychiatric Center, joint announcement of 7 September 2010 (PR Newswire) — the transfer of the St. Joseph County CMHC designation effective 5 p.m., 24 September 2010, by mutual agreement; the simultaneous termination and new agreement of the state managed-care contracts; the lease of space at Madison; and the express statement that inpatient services were not affected.
2. Hospitals section of this history — the March 2011 purchase of Madison's inpatient assets by Memorial Hospital, the approximately ninety beds, the Memorial Epworth Center at 420 North Niles Avenue, Beacon's description of the Epworth operation as the county's only inpatient behavioral health facility, and Madison's post-2011 course at directory size, carried at that size here.
3. St. Joseph County, "Historical timeline of the St. Joseph County Home" — the 2012 entry: "Madison Center closed due to financial strain," with the dispositions of inpatient and outpatient services that followed at Portage Manor. The variance between the county timeline's closure line and the Hospitals record's directory-size continuation is stated in the entry and not reconciled.