Mental Patient Held After Break-In : Health: He said he wanted to continue receiving treatment at county psychiatric hospital. The facility has stopped accepting new cases because of budget cuts.

SAN DIEGO —  Just hours after the financially strapped San Diego County Psychiatric Hospital stopped admitting patients this week, a former patient--apparently determined to continue his treatment--scrambled over a 20-foot hospital wall, attacked two nurses with a pipe and pleaded with hospital staff to be readmitted, authorities confirmed Thursday.

“He said, ‘I want to go to the hospital. Don’t send me to jail.’ He was mumbling and saying Jesus Christ made him do what he did,” said one hospital employee who said he helped restrain the man Wednesday night. “It was his way of getting in. He was extremely disappointed when we said we would not admit him.”

The alleged break-in came one day after the County Board of Supervisors voted to cut $3.7 million from the hospital’s budget, thus halting the admission of new patients.

However, a hospital spokesman said he believed the bizarre incident was unrelated to the cutbacks, which will eventually close 45 of the facility’s 75 acute-care beds.

“It’s interesting, the coincidental timing,” said Patrick Stalnaker, a spokesman for county mental health services. “But I think this is a freak occurence. I honestly do.”

Police said the former patient, John David Mallen, leaped from the wall into a hospital recreation yard at about 6:30 p.m. Wednesday and began hitting Natoa Dorn, a nurse, with a large metal pipe. Another nurse, Abel Barrios, helped Dorn restrain Mallen, who was arrested and jailed on suspicion of battery and burglary, authorities said. Neither man was seriously hurt.

On Thursday, Mallen, 22, was under psychiatric observation at the downtown County Jail.

According to another hospital employee, who asked that her name not be used for fear of reprisals from hospital management, Mallen had been discharged from the hospital six weeks ago after three months of treatment. During the last week, the source said, Mallen had tried to re-enter the hospital through a back door, but had been told to go to the voluntary treatment entrance. He apparently never went, the source said.

“He was told, ‘You have to come around and have to be reassessed. But since you were recently discharged, it’s unlikely you’re going to be admitted,’ ” the source said. “He went and decided a lead pipe would be the answer.”

If Mallen had sought voluntary treatment at the hospital Wednesday and had been found to be gravely mentally disabled, hospital officials would have had to seek a place for him in a private hospital, officials said.

Despite the stance of hospital officials, some hospital employees said Mallen’s outburst illustrated the consequences of recent budgetary trims.

Under the recent cuts, the hospital will have just 30 beds to serve acutely ill patients in crisis in the county. In addition, the county will contract with private hospitals for 20 more beds--a decision that county doctors have criticized, saying that private hospitals are not ready or willing to handle their most difficult, violent patients.

“The irony of it is that, by coincidence, just one day after (the board voted to fund more contract hospital beds), we have a patient so extreme that he would climb into our hospital to attack somebody,” said Dr. David A. Schein, a psychiatrist who has run the hospital’s emergency unit for six years.

“We cannot emphasize enough the seriousness of patients that we have to deal with,” Schein said. “Now not only do we have violent patients in the hospital. Now they’re climbing over the walls from the outside.”

San Diego County’s recent mental health budget cuts are compounded by reductions in state support for mental health services over the years. For years, mental health workers and relatives of patients have protested that too little state money is allocated to care for the mentally ill.