Behavioral Health

Ventura County has, for years, systematically shifted millions of dollars earmarked for mental health services to the county's health agency, supporting critics' claims that money is being siphoned away to run the county's public hospital, records show. Some of the transfers came from a special trust fund designed to treat the mentally ill. Together with two other fiscal practices that channeled money away from the mental health agency, as much as $4 million each year was shifted, critics say.

Warning that Ventura County stands to lose millions of dollars, an expert hired to oversee the creation of a new superagency is recommending that county leaders do more homework before implementing the plan. In a memo to the Board of Supervisors, consultant David P. Henninger advises that the move to meld the Public Social Services Agency with the Behavioral Health Department should be at least partly postponed until it can be studied in detail.

In an industrial zone a few blocks off the 101 Freeway, the Tarzana Treatment Center relies on government contracts and nonprofit tax status to serve drug addicts in poverty or trouble with the law. A clerk sits behind protective glass in the lobby. Down a hallway in the detox wing, down-and-out men are curled on their cots. The coat hooks in the rooms flip down so patients can't hang themselves. It hardly seems like the headquarters of a $45-million-a-year business.

Speaking publicly for the first time since being forced off the job, Behavioral Health Director Stephen G. Kaplan said Tuesday the department has been unfairly attacked in the wake of a failed attempt to merge with the county's social services agency. "We've been bashed and trashed and called the bad boy of the county. I don't see it that way at all," Kaplan said in an interview.

A civil investigation by the U.S. attorney's office has reached a critical point in determining whether the county's Behavioral Health Department committed fraud in its federal billing practices. "We're about to find out an important piece of information," Assistant U.S. Atty. Wendy Weiss said Wednesday. "We're in a touchy phase right now and it could go one way or another," Weiss said, declining to be more specific.

Just when hope for needed improvements for the mentally ill seemed least likely, a Phoenix rose from the ashes of audits and county divisiveness. Dr. Pierre Durand, head of the Ventura County Health Care Agency, directed his time and attention to improve care for people suffering brain disorders. He appointed David Gudeman, an insightful and caring doctor, to serve as interim Behavioral Health director.

Tiger Woods' mistresses. Arnold Schwarzenegger's secret child. Bill Clinton's sexual escapades in the Oval Office. Every case of a prominent man risking his family, career and status for extramarital sex raises the question: What were they thinking? Mental health experts wonder this too, and not just because of the cases that make headlines. Each year, thousands of men and women from all walks of life seek psychiatric help for sexual conduct disorders, said doctors gathered here last week at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Assn.

San Bernardino County officials said Thursday that they are making changes at the Department of Behavioral Health after three county therapists failed to report a bloodied knife and pair of jeans to law enforcement officials at the site of a fatal stabbing. The therapists arrived on the afternoon of Jan. 8 to look for evidence of drug use at an independent living home for seven mentally ill felons in the 300 block of South Bixby Way in Upland, according to the San Bernardino County district attorney's office.

Kevin DeWitt, the county's former mental health administrator, pleaded guilty Tuesday to a single felony count of using forged documents to obtain an $83,000-a-year job. In entering the plea, DeWitt admitted to presenting a phony doctoral diploma to secure his former position as deputy director of the county's Behavioral Health Department in 1996.

In four days of intensive meetings, the 3,000 AIDS researchers gathered here last week for the eighth annual Retrovirus Conference saw little to be cheerful about. True, some promising new drugs appear to be on the horizon, but none is expected to be the blockbuster that protease inhibitors were when they were introduced five years ago.