Psychiatrists

Four additional counts of child molestation were filed Thursday against a prominent psychiatrist who is accused of fondling his young, troubled patients. A prosecutor said two more alleged victims have come forward in the past week and accused Dr. William Ayres, 75, of molesting them each twice in 1991 or 1992. The boys were between 9 and 12 when the alleged assaults took place, prosecutor Melissa McKowan said.

At his re-arraignment Thursday, a prominent child psychiatrist pleaded not guilty to molesting patients after a judge ruled that there was enough evidence for him to stand trial. Dr. William Ayres, 75, pleaded not guilty to 20 counts of lewd and lascivious behavior on a child under 14 between 1988 and 1996. The charges involve seven alleged victims.

After two years of litigation, a Brentwood psychiatrist who owes $273,000 in spousal and child support was sentenced Wednesday to four years probation and ordered to pay $4,250 per month or risk going to jail. The order against Ronald Alan Gershman, 50, came after a Municipal Court jury convicted him of two counts of contempt of court for nonpayment of spousal and child support. During the trial, Deputy Dist. Atty.

The nation's shrinks are depressed. Pressures to contain mental health costs, along with increased competition from psychologists and other therapists, are eroding traditional roles in the psychiatric profession. Psychiatrists, whose stock and trade long has been talking with patients about their depression, anxiety and other mental disturbances, are in danger of being reduced to the role of diagnosticians and prescribers of medications.

Dr. Park Elliott Dietz has become famous searching for the line that separates evil from madness, probing the dark and twisted psyches of some of the nation's most notorious criminals. On Thursday, Dietz, one of the FBI's premier forensic psychiatrists, turned his owlish gaze on Erik Menendez, testifying as the prosecution's star rebuttal witness in the once-sensational Beverly Hills murder case.

U.S. psychiatrists will be allowed to visit Soviet mental hospitals and interview patients, the State Department announced Friday, possibly opening the way for the release of many people who may have been committed for political reasons. The agreement results from unprecedented human rights talks in Washington between the two countries and is part of a broad U.S. effort to focus on what it considers human rights abuses in the Soviet Union.

As the earthquake rumbled through Southern California early Thursday morning, a 3-year-old child panicked, convinced that a monster was trying to break into the house. But in another home, a 5-year-old giggled, "This is fun," and calmly instructed his frightened parents to get under the table and "curl up like a baby with your arms up around your head." And in Tustin, more than two hours after the temblor hit, health worker Linda Lew suddenly got "teary-eyed. I just needed to be with people.

"Where are we going to put the narcissists?" It was a question asked urgently by one of the hundreds of psychiatrists gathered here last week for their professional society's annual meeting. With doctors in the thick of a years-long effort to rewrite the essential textbook for diagnosing mental illnesses, questions like these came up time and again in meeting rooms, over drinks sipped from coconut shells, and in other venues during the five-day conference. Among the myriad proposals now on the table: reducing the number of specific personality disorders from 10 to five, a move that would eliminate the diagnosis of narcissistic disorder.

For the first time ever, a team of American psychiatrists has arrived here to tour previously off-limits Soviet psychiatric hospitals, question patients and assess allegations that dissidents have been drugged and silenced under the guise of being insane. The Americans, whose trip is sponsored by the State Department, will question 25 to 30 patients and former patients whose cases have been considered controversial, said Dr. Loren H. Roth, who heads the team.

Psychiatrist William Vicary, whose testimony about his altered notes threw the second Menendez brothers murder trial into turmoil, has been removed from the panel of mental health professionals who are appointed by county judges to analyze and testify about defendants in court cases. In an Aug.