Tehama County.

Tehama County is an agricultural valley county of approximately 73,000 residents spread across 2,950 square miles, centered on the Sacramento River corridor (SimpleMapLab, n.d.). The county has one of the highest rates of domestic violence-related emergency calls in Northern California (North State Parent, 2022), and intimate partner violence is consistently identified as a top behavioral health concern by the county's health department. The county also has elevated rates of methamphetamine use and alcohol use disorder.

Red Bluff, the county seat, has limited outpatient mental health capacity relative to need. Rural communities like Flournoy, Vina, and Rancho Tehama have no local options whatsoever. Tehama County residents also face long wait times for county-operated behavioral health services, often stretching three to six months for a first appointment. PMHS offers same-week availability with no referral required and PHP covers all sessions at no cost. Telephone-only sessions are available for patients with limited internet access, and PHP covers both video and audio formats.

PMHS provides individual therapy including trauma-focused approaches for survivors of domestic violence and intimate partner violence. We also work with anxiety, depression, anger management, substance use co-occurring presentations, and parenting stress.

PHP covers your sessions at no cost and no referral is required. If you are navigating a difficult or unsafe situation, we take that seriously and will work with you individually on what you need. Same-week availability is standard at PMHS.

Tehama County straddles Interstate 5 between Redding and Chico, with Red Bluff as its seat and Corning as its second city, surrounded by ranch land, olive orchards, and foothill communities that stretch toward the Yolla Bollys in the west and Mineral in the east. The county's own behavioral health capacity is thin, and residents have long defaulted to driving north or south on I-5 for anything beyond the basics, when they go at all. The foothill and west-side communities, Rancho Tehama among them, are furthest from everything. Telehealth flattens the county's geography entirely: Manton, Los Molinos, and Red Bluff are all the same distance from care, which is none.

PMHS serves Tehama PHP members with individual therapy for depression, anxiety, and trauma, care for households navigating the aftermath of domestic violence and substance use, and adolescent services under EPSDT. Evening and weekend appointments fit ranch and agricultural schedules, telephone sessions cover the foothills where internet fails, and the video platform requires no download. Covered PHP members pay nothing, need no referral, and face no waitlist. We respond to every inquiry within one hour between 8am and 8pm, or by 9am the next morning, and most Tehama patients are scheduled for their intake session within the same week.

Both PMHS clinicians, Ryan Frost, LMFT, and Dmitri Kolpacoff, APCC, see patients throughout Tehama County. There is no assignment by location, whichever clinician has availability is the one who reaches out to you.

After you reach out, your clinician contacts you directly, always starting with a text, then by phone or email depending on what you prefer, to confirm you are ready to get started. You will then get an email invitation from SimplePractice, our patient portal, to finish setting up your account and sign your consent forms electronically. From there you schedule a time directly with the clinician who reached out to you, typically within the same week for Tehama County patients. Your first appointment is a full intake session, 50 to 60 minutes, not a short screening call, and this is also when your Partnership HealthPlan coverage is confirmed. Sessions run on Doxy.me, a HIPAA-compliant video platform that requires no download and no account, and phone-only sessions are available if your internet is unreliable.

If you are experiencing a medical emergency, call 911 or go to the nearest emergency room. PMHS provides outpatient therapy and is not a crisis or emergency service.

If you move to a county Partnership HealthPlan does not cover, you will typically lose your PHP eligibility, this is what we have seen happen with our own patients. If that happens, we talk through your options with you directly. That usually means private pay with PMHS, or asking your Medi-Cal case manager about what is called an in-county transfer, which reassigns your coverage to a PHP county. An in-county transfer requires traveling to that county to see your primary care provider, since PHP coverage is tied to where your primary care is based. There is no need to sort this out alone, reach out and we will walk through what makes sense for your situation.

Approximate location. PMHS is 100% telehealth, so this map is here to help you get oriented, not to confirm eligibility, what qualifies you is your PHP enrollment, not your exact address.

View larger map

Tehama County follows the Sacramento River south from Shasta, and Red Bluff anchors a stretch of river access and agricultural land that people here use regularly. The river trail and the Bureau of Land Management areas east of the valley are within reach for anyone based in Red Bluff or Corning.

Cited in APA 7 style. This list covers claims that have been independently source-checked; not every statement on this page has a citation yet.