Had Sex With Patients : Psychiatrist Loses Suit for Disability Benefits

A Costa Mesa psychiatrist who contended that mental illness caused him to have sexual relationships with his female patients and tell them it was part of their therapy was denied disability benefits Monday by an Orange County Superior Court jury.

After deliberating only one day, the jury ruled 11 to 1 that George Prastka, 53, was not totally disabled by mental illness and therefore deserved neither the monthly disability payments of $3,200 nor the $500,000 in punitive damages he sought from Massachusetts Casualty Insurance Co.

“Everybody felt that Dr. Prastka does have a problem, but to describe it as total disability was difficult to all of us,” said Mareva Murphy, jury foreman. “I don’t know as we discussed anything about sympathy. We did feel he has a problem, but as to it being a totally disabling illness, none of us thought that it was.”

According to Mark Edwards, Prastka’s attorney, the psychiatrist’s problems began in 1976, when he was placed on five years’ probation by the California Board of Medical Quality Assurance for overprescribing drugs to patients.

Three years later, the board began another investigation into Prastka’s practices after at least three woman patients complained that he was overprescribing the sedative Quaalude and engaging in sexual encounters with them while they were still his patients, Edwards said during the two-week trial.

When confronted with his patients’ written statements and photographs showing him in sexual encounters, Prastka confessed to the misconduct and agreed to give up his medical license in 1979.

Edwards contended that mental illness caused Prastka to have sex with his patients, led to the loss of his medical license and destroyed his ability to earn a living.

But the jury ruled in favor of the insurance company--whose attorney said Prastka “chose to break some rules . . . and may have just been trying to satisfy his own sexual desires.”

Esther Brown, a Santa Ana schoolteacher, was the only juror who voted in Prastka’s favor. (Unlike criminal cases, in which verdicts must be unanimous, civil court cases can be won on majority votes of nine or more jurors.)

“He did have evidence of having some kind of problem,” Brown said. “It seemed impossible to me that someone in their right mind would so violently throw away his career. . . . I think he was mentally disabled in some degree.”

Edwards still contends that Prastka is the victim of a crippling character disorder, which has reduced the once affluent psychiatrist to working as a $5.75-an-hour assistant in a veterinary laboratory.

‘Going to Try to Cope’

“I am disappointed,” Edwards said. “I feel George is a sick man. I have had a tremendous amount of difficulty . . . even carrying on a conversation with him. It has been a difficult case for me to handle because I have been unable to converse with him as I do with other clients.”

Prastka and his wife, Linea, sat stoically silent as the jury’s decision was read. When the court proceedings were over, and Judge Phillip A. Petty was thanking the jurors for their efforts, Prastka said he was not surprised by the ruling against him.

“We realized it was going to be a difficult case, very difficult,” said Prastka. “We’re now going to try to cope with life and start over again and that’s it. We are going to continue life just as we have been.”