SIMI VALLEY : Grant Aids Quake Crisis Counselors

He couldn’t sleep at night. Instead, he slept all day. Sometimes, he would drive out to the store and, inexplicably, start crying.

“It seemed like the world just crumpled,” said Ray Geiger, 69, of Simi Valley.

In fact, Geiger’s world began crumpling when his house did in the Jan. 17 earthquake. With cracks in the foundation from front to back and asbestos exposed in the ceilings and floors, Geiger couldn’t leave behind the 6.8 magnitude quake.

So last month, he showed up at the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s earthquake crisis center and asked to speak to a counselor.

“Why did you wait so long?” Sheila Daya, a county mental health worker, asked him.

“I didn’t want to be the one in our neighborhood to say I needed help,” Geiger, his voice breaking with emotion, told the Ventura County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday.

Geiger is exactly the type of resident who county mental health counselors hope to help with their new nine-month, $4.2-million grant from FEMA for earthquake crisis counseling.

“Our strategic goal is not therapy or treatment of the mentally ill,” said Randy Feltman, director of mental health services. “It’s to have normal people get back to their normal lives.”

Battered by skeptics who would rather see the federal money go to rebuilding bricks and mortar, Feltman argued that the counseling money accounts for only one-fifth of 1% of the federal and state funds allotted for earthquake recovery.

The county board agreed to accept the federal funds formally, but not before questioning Feltman about the agencies he chose to share in the grant money.

The grant includes five nonprofit agencies that will provide services to schools, the mentally ill and other special populations. Also, the county will hire 100 workers for their outreach program.

But the county overlooked the Network for Behavioral Medicine, a group of Simi Valley mental health counselors that had been serving earthquake victims since January.

Feltman said he would negotiate with the private group but added that FEMA typically frowns on using private, for-profit agencies and mental health professionals. What’s more, he said traditional counselors may risk overkill in a program that deals simply with “normal people,” such as Ray Geiger.

“All we want to do is get him back to a place where he can go on with his life and just leave him alone,” Feltman said.