When Jayne Kidder lived alone, she had bad dreams at night. "I dreamed someone tried to walk in my room and tried to strangle me," she said, circling her neck with her hands. Kidder, 50, suffers from depression and bipolar disorder. Over the years, she's moved between living in group homes and on her own.

In her last residence at Kennedy Apartments in Concord, she struggled.

"I couldn't do my grocery shopping, cooking by myself, it was hard to get downtown to stores," Kidder said. "I wanted to be with other people to talk to, hang out with, socialize, go on van rides with them."

Since she moved into Miller House, a group home on Pleasant Street for people with chronic mental illness, her bad dreams have subsided. Staff from Riverbend Community Mental Health help her with medications and teach her social skills. They shop for her groceries and take her on trips. Kidder has a sunlamp in her room that she turns on every day, which makes her feel better.

Soon, Kidder will have to move again.

Miller House will close this April for budgetary reasons, and its residents will be scattered between other Riverbend programs and the Merrimack County Nursing Home.

"The board of directors and myself don't feel we have any choice," said Riverbend President and CEO Louis Josephson. "We're closing Miller House to save $150,000."

The 13-bed home relies on reimbursements from Medicaid, Medicare and private insurance. Josephson said the house gets paid $107 a day from Medicaid to care for each patient. The real cost is closer to $170. As a result, Riverbend subsidizes the home with about $150,000 a year - a cost it can no longer bear.

Riverbend has guaranteed that it will not close Miller House until every resident is settled in a new home.

"We're just trying to find a plan for every individual, to make sure they're in the best possible place," Josephson said.

Miller House used to be a short-term crisis center. In 2001, Riverbend began using it as a home to care for some of its sickest patients. Many suffer from schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, and some residents have been in and out of the state hospital. Some stay for months; many have been there for years. Mental health counselors act as psychiatrists and nurses, doing everything from supervising cooking to dispensing medications to talking residents through their problems.

David Potter, 61, has paranoid schizophrenia and has been at Miller House for seven years. Before that, he lived in a system of independent apartments run by Riverbend that had mental health support during the day. Unlike most residents, Potter has a job. He works 20 hours a week for Community Action Program Belknap-Merrimack Counties Inc. packing food boxes for the needy. But in the apartment, he said, his rent was too high and he had to walk nearly a mile to get a bus.

"I never learned the schedule," he said.

At Miller House, his life is easier. Although he pays for services, Potter said, "everything's supplied for you." The bus picks him up down the block, and he is able to go to work, come home and do his chores - cooking or washing pots and pans.

When the group home closes, Potter will move to a new Riverbend house on Fayette Street expected to open in April. That house will have nine beds, but it will only offer mental health care during the day. Without 24-hour care, the method of billing is different and the home should be able to break even, Josephson said.

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