Fury Beneath The Facade ( depression, the V V A, and the VA )

[MORTARDUDE]

( long story but well worth the time to read it...describes depression and is right on...also how the V V A helped him with the VA )

The Washington Post

December 21, 2003


Fury Beneath The Facade


Monte Reel, Washington Post Staff Writer

Walking down 15th Street, the man's attention wanders.

It's a damp October morning, the air spiced with dying leaves. He feels the threat of rain in his stiffening knee. He sees the camera-carrying tourists, the uniformed guards, the concrete barriers blocking traffic at the intersection ahead.

Processing the images, he mentally maps his coordinates: He's approaching Pennsylvania Avenue, and the White House is just a short sprint away.

He quickens his pace, walking as fast as his knee will allow.

"Too close," he says, crossing

the street to distance himself.

"Too close."

Something like a shadow darkens Robert W. Pickett's mind when the pressure builds, he says. Hope becomes indistinguishable from the blackest of fears, and the truth looks the same as a lie.

A recurrent thought: Your so-called recovery is a joke, so give up.

In February 2001, Pickett drove to Northern Virginia from Indiana, took the Metro into the District, swallowed a disorienting mix of pills with orange juice and fired three shots near the south gate of the White House. He was shot in a knee by a Secret Service officer, and he ended up in a federal prison near Dallas for more than two years.

Because no one back home would sponsor him, the courts ordered Pickett to return to the jurisdiction where he committed the crime for three years of supervised release. He left prison in September with two shoe boxes of possessions, $400 in cash and a bus voucher for Washington. After 1,300 miles of crooked-neck naps and fast food, he arrived at the D.C. bus terminal at 3:30 a.m. on a Sunday. He knew no one in the city. No one greeted him.

A recurrent thought: The government is corrupt and should be exposed.

Years ago, he was working for the IRS as an auditor in Cincinnati when pressure between him and a boss mounted. He accused the boss of ordering him and other auditors to disregard tax law, and his behavior grew increasingly erratic. Absences began piling up, and he eventually lost his job. He spent the next decade trying to convince the government that mental illness -- not Robert Pickett -- was to blame. Federal panels ruled against his discrimination complaints, and the courts dismissed his lawsuits. The White House shooting was a suicide attempt meant to implicate a symbol, he said. A letter was found in his pocket addressed to, among others, the IRS and President Bush: "My death is on your hands."

Almost three years later, says Pickett, 50, the same darkness he took to the White House still shadows him everywhere he goes in this city of symbols. It's there when he crawls into his bunk at a homeless shelter, just a couple of blocks from the Capitol. It's there when he copies legal documents to resuscitate his fight against the government at a Kinko's, three blocks from IRS headquarters on Constitution Avenue. It's there when he walks out of his way to avoid the White House.

A recurrent thought: Just because you know the darkness is there, you don't have to throw the rest of your life away.

He says he is working very hard to view that as the truth.

Secret Service officers briefly visited Pickett at the shelter shortly after he arrived to tell him that they knew he was around. He hasn't seen them since. His supervised-release officer, who directed him to the homeless shelter over the phone, stopped by a day later. He told Pickett that he would check on him every couple of weeks.

Other than that, his time has been his own.

"I am operating without a safety net of any kind," Pickett said a week after he arrived.

Not exactly: Services were available, but it was up to him to find most of them and set his own schedule. That's standard for most discharged inmates with histories of mental illness, say mental health advocates, who are pushing for a change. Pickett's supervised-release officer did point him in a helpful direction, telling him that he should explore the Veterans Affairs Department's mental health offerings because he once served in the military. Days after Pickett's arrival, the officer accompanied him to the VA to get an identification card and to show him how to sign up for an outpatient therapy program. Pickett told him that he would try to enroll.

But for more than a month, other business intervened.

His first priority was his legal cases. Before he was released in September, his prison psychologist asked him what he was going to do to take control of his life upon release. He told her that he would continue battling the government, to try to convince the courts that the IRS wrongfully dismissed him by underestimating his mental illness. If that worked, he might be able to overturn his conviction and get a disability pension. Pursuing the fight, he said, was his driving motivation for keeping his depression under control.

So a month after he arrived, he sat down at a computer in a D.C. job center and confronted an unspoken choice: He could spend his time pursuing mental health therapy options on the Internet, or he could work on trying to revive his legal cases.

At the computer terminal, he began to type: "Robert W. Pickett asks the court to reconsider its decision on the plaintiff's mental competency . . . "

Pickett had put 15 city blocks under his feet that same day, walking from the homeless shelter to an outstretched hand that greeted him in a downtown office building.

The hand belonged to Nathaniel Slayton Jr., a case manager at the Vietnam Veterans of America. Pickett found him by accident a few weeks earlier when he was looking for the VA headquarters, which is in the same building. It was a fortunate mistake: Slayton immediately agreed to help Pickett file a claim for disability benefits from the Veterans Department.

"Here's something that might help you sort through all my stuff," Pickett said, handing Slayton three stapled pages.

It was a brief biography, starting with Pickett's childhood in Evansville, Ind., and ending in a dizzying chronicle of court proceedings in Ohio. Slayton scanned the skeletal entries describing Pickett's accountant father and his speech therapist mother. He read about Pickett's scarring acne, his good grades.

"No dating in high school," Slayton read. "Man, what's up with that?"

"Read my psychiatric diagnosis," Pickett advised, referring to a psychiatrist's statement after his conviction that said he suffered from social phobia, avoidance disorder and recurrent severe depression with psychotic features.

But Slayton still hadn't read 21/2 pages of the biography -- the bad parts. So he continued, reading about Pickett's almost-immediate resignation from West Point after becoming a cadet in 1971. A list of failures at various universities followed. Then there was his enrollment in the Air Force, his trip to a military hospital for a psychiatric evaluation after he went AWOL, his discharge. Slayton scanned the entries recounting his hiring as an auditor at the IRS, his problems with supervisors, the deepening depression, his frequent absences, the eventual dismissal, two suicide attempts on the parade grounds at West Point, three lawsuits, the White House. . .

Slayton tossed the biography on the desk. He has helped veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder collect benefits that the VA previously told them they weren't entitled to, and he said he thinks he can do the same for Pickett. He says he'll try to prove that Pickett's mental illness was aggravated by the military and led to his discharge in 1976.

Slayton grabbed a manual from a shelf, searching for a phrase in a list of disabling illnesses eligible for benefits.

"Chronic adjustment disorder," Slayton said. "That's the road I'm going to travel in your case."

For the first time since he got out of prison, he later said, Pickett felt as if he had found someone who didn't consider him a waste of time.

By early November, Pickett had signed a "behavior contract" with the VA Medical Center's Partial Hospitalization Program outpatient therapy plan. He pledged to attend five days a week. He promised to clear any absences with the staff. He promised to take medication for anxiety and depression.

"The staff does a good job of keeping things running smoothly," he said, walking down the pink halls of the center's third floor. "You can imagine with so many people with so many different problems, it can get kind of hectic at times."

Several weeks after he enrolled, Pickett decided that he was ready to tell his story to his therapy group. He and about five others sat around a table, sharing histories. Some had been hooked on drugs. Some struggled with schizophrenia. Some had lost their homes.

Pickett steeled himself. Depression, he told them, had gotten the best of him. And that's how he ended up in jail.

Drifting attentions seemed to snap to focus. Jail? Pickett recognized their surprise and thought he knew what it meant: Such a mild-mannered, considerate, articulate, tucked-in and clean-cut man didn't seem the criminal type.

What did you go to jail for, someone asked.

Pickett's facial features are kinetic -- his eyebrows often dance over the frames of his glasses while his cheeks tighten into a clenched smile. It's an expression intended to appear unthreatening, a defusing device. He adopts the look regularly in a variety of situations: in a crowded drugstore entranceway, politely allowing a woman to pass before him; at a table in a sandwich shop as he wipes up the soda he spilled; at the homeless shelter, passing a cluster of residents hanging out by the front door.

When Pickett finished telling his story, he braced for reactions.

One group member, her tone mock-scolding, said he had joined the group under false pretenses; she figured he was there because someone killed his cat, she said.

Funny, but it tweaked him a little. People find it very hard to believe that he has a serious illness, he says. A week before he went to the White House, he had written a magistrate judge: "My rational facade fools everyone. . . . I hide in my hole and wait. I battle insomnia, the muscle tension, the depression, the anxiety, the anger, the despair and life itself. But to the normal people, I can't have a problem; I'm too intelligent."

Pickett told the group about his legal battles. He often speaks of his battles with something akin to patriotic ardor: He is trying to fight for justice, he says, for himself and others like him.

"You can't fight the government," Pickett remembered one group member telling him, the words freighted with a world-weariness meant to imply that the man spoke from experience.

Pickett disregarded the statement, relegating it to a vast file of discarded advice and opinion. Other examples of statements that Pickett has disregarded after hearing about them:

* "I told him I thought he exhausted all the legal remedies to the extent I knew them," said James Fields, Pickett's former attorney based in Evansville.

* "Speaking generally, it's a tough thing to show," said William H. Reid, forensic psychiatry consultant and past president of the Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, commenting on mental health disability cases like Pickett's.

* "There is insufficient proof that the Plaintiff was disabled, although certainly troubled," said the U.S. District Court in southern Ohio in 1999. "Although given the opportunity, Plaintiff has failed to demonstrate mental incompetency, because there is no proof that Plaintiff fails to comprehend the nature and cause of his injury."

* "He keeps going after this battle that has been lost many times and will never be won," said David Adkins, whom Pickett met in the Air Force. They became reacquainted during Pickett's time with the IRS in Ohio. Adkins added that Pickett would turn on friends and therapists without warning, accusing them of scheming or incompetence. "Just when it looked like he was doing great, then he'd go off the deep end, and we'd have no idea why."

Pickett said he had heard it all before, and he said it still didn't seem like truth.

Your so-called recovery is a joke, so give up . . .

It was the Sunday after Thanksgiving, and Pickett felt nauseated. He had heard nothing new on his claims for VA benefits, and there was no sign that his legal battles were going anywhere. He had gotten a letter from a whistleblower's organization that said they couldn't help him. None of the more than 100 lawyers he had contacted had good news for him. A blood test he took at the VA indicated that he had a kidney condition. He had spent much of his weekend browsing case law at the city library, and he felt overwhelmed.

So on that Sunday, he reclined in his bunk, clustered with about 10 others in a cubicle on the first floor of the shelter. He had been living there long enough to know which guys he should say hi to and which ones he should avoid. He knew which four of the 16 showerheads in the men's bathroom actually worked. And he knew that if he didn't immediately walk about 50 paces to that bathroom very quickly, everyone was going to see a mess.

He didn't make it, vomiting on the stained white tiles by his bunk before he could even slip on his shower sandals.

It was stress, he said, and it was building.

He flew through the next two weeks like a man on a swing -- up, down, up, down -- until he dropped lower than he'd been since he arrived.

"I'm going to sue PHP!" he shouted about an hour after storming out of the VA Medical Center one morning. "They're violating my civil rights!"

Staff members, he said, were suggesting that he drop his battles against the IRS, that he shouldn't define himself so much through those cases. One social worker, Pickett said, recommended that he give up his burdens to a "higher power." Pickett, an atheist, complained that members of the staff were "trying to shove religion down my throat." They didn't understand, he said, that his legal quest was not just for him, but for all people oppressed by the government, that he is not simply a self-pitying attention-seeker, that the setbacks everyone else seems to regard as petty inconveniences are, in fact, tragic in scale.

Uncharacteristic obscenities wormed into his sentences as his pitch rose to strained heights. He cursed the judges who ruled that he was competent, the lawyers who defended him, the therapists who didn't understand him. They were fools, he said. If a man tries to commit suicide outside the White House, he said, how can they think that man could be of sound mind?

"I wonder if being dead would mean I'd be ruled incompetent!" he shouted. "I guess the only thing they think I'm incompetent at is committing suicide!"

After several minutes, he calmed down a little.

"Quite frankly," he said, "I don't care if a bus hits me tomorrow."

Severe depression, unreachable by direct language, is most easily addressed obliquely, through metaphor. And Pickett is a skilled practitioner. He says such things as, "Depression is a gorilla, and I can't look at the gorilla in the eyes, because if I lock eyes with it, I become just another creature in that jungle." He writes such things as:

I am a bowl of Jell-O

Colorless, bland in taste.

I quiver when touched.

There is a park abutting the National Building Museum at Judiciary Square where Pickett likes to sit when the weather is mild. Sometimes he can be found with his creased paperback copy of Robert Frost's "Collected Poems." Out of the thousands of stanzas in the book, one is circled and its margin starred. It's from the poem "Reluctance":

Ah, when to the heart of man

Was it ever less than a treason

To go with the drift of things

To yield with a grace to reason

And bow and accept the end

Of a love or a season?

Days after his outburst cursing his therapists, he returned to the program because, he said, he didn't want to squander any progress. He certainly wasn't ready to concede his battles with the government, he said, but his attitude had settled into one of subdued regret, touched with a low-grade strain of optimism.

In the park, and almost everywhere he goes in this city, he sees families of tourists, walking with their heads turning madly on their necks, their eyes wide. The sight of them triggers a recurrent memory: Pickett, his parents and his older brother are on a trip to the city in 1964. It's their only real family vacation. Before leaving Indiana, 11-year-old Robert had consulted the best books he could find and helped draft the list of must-sees. He remembers seeing the Smithsonian museums. He remembers eating lunch in the cafeteria of the Supreme Court. He remembers watching House Speaker John W. McCormick orate from a seat in the gallery.

The memory often prompts him to imagine what might have happened if his life had followed a different path after that vacation.

"Who knows -- if I didn't have my problems, maybe I'd be a literature professor now," he says, "or a one-star general or something."

Five minutes later, he's on E Street, closing his jacket collar around his scarf and squinting into a cold December wind. A man approaches from behind to match his stride on the sidewalk and thrusts something in front of Pickett. It's a glossy brochure advertising a trolley tour of all the sites -- the monuments, the Capitol, the White House.

"C'mon, guy," the man says, hoping to get some change for the free pamphlet. "A little something?"

It is at times like these that Pickett most vividly realizes that it is not 1964, and it will never be again. His parents are dead, and he and his brother don't speak anymore. He is not a literature professor, and he is not a one-star general. He is a man with problems, and it is up to him to solve them.

He still thinks: Just because you know the darkness is there, you don't have to throw the rest of your life away.

"C'mon, guy," says the man, who is persistently walking beside him. "Help the homeless."

"Hey," Pickett says, "I'm with you."