Freed from Napa State, Morin Speaks

Want to know what it’s like to spend a decade and a half at Napa State Hospital? Ask Wayne Morin, Jr.

“I was in Napa (State) Hospital, not in and out, but for 365 days a year,” Morin said recently at his apartment at an Imola Avenue complex just steps from the hospital grounds.

A troubled child of the late 1960s whose mother was a free-spirited drug user, Morin, now 54, was in and out of jail and state hospitals more than 100 times throughout his teens, all for non-violent charges, he said.

But the in-and-out part stopped after an incident in 1987, when Morin, then living in Calistoga, had become such a problem drinker that no retailer would sell him alcohol.

Angered when even the St. Helena Safeway wouldn’t sell to him, Morin drank up his grandmother’s cooking sherry and called in a bomb threat to the store.

“I was drunk,” he said. That prank would lead to Morin’s longest stay at Napa State, following time in the .

Released in 2003 under a conditional release program, better known as ConRep, Morin now lives independently, hosts television shows on and does odd jobs in the community, running errands on his cargo bicycle.

But while Morin no longer lives at Napa State, and has graduated from the conditional release program, the hospital is still a big part of his life.

Not only can he see the hospital wards from the windows of his apartment, but Morin has made it his mission to speak out about the hospital’s problems—and the possibilities for improvement.

In addition to his Napa TV show Let’s Talk Napa State Hospital, Morin also appears on other talk shows and has submitted to polygraph tests to prove his assertions that NSH staff routinely used and administered street drugs to patients while he was there.

The stigma of mental illness is real, but Morin firmly believes that patients like him can have a future.

Conditional release is “a excellent program,” he said, because it offers the emerging patient a great deal of support in finding housing and work as well as mental health support services.

“The community needs to get behind their local mental health and get more of these ConReps and expand them as much as they can,” he said.

“Mental illness can happen to anybody.”

Morin hosts a  at 5:30 p.m. today on Napa TV Channel 28, with special guests including Colin Gunn, producer of IndoctriNation: Public Schools and the Decline of Religion in AmericaSaveCalifornia.com President Randy Thomasson; , the Napa Tea Party teen who stole the show at a GOP debate with his tax question last year; , Napa Tea Party Coordinator and , Program Specialist & Foster & Kinship Care Education (FKCE). 

The call-in number is 707-257-0574.