One of the most frequently repeated messages during my time on active duty in the U.S. Army was the importance of seeking help. If you were dealing with depression, relationship issues, or struggling with your mental health post-deployment, the recommendation was always the same: go to Behavioral Health. The Army advertised this message everywhere, pushing to reduce the stigma around mental healthcare and, most importantly, to combat soldier suicide – a persistent issue for decades. The process was simple: one phone call, and you could schedule an appointment.
On February 17, 2021, I met therapist Margaret Lockwood for the first time. After two long years of relentless attacks from my unit, bullying in front of leadership, and watching career opportunities slip through my fingers, I had no choice but to seek help from Fort Eustis Behavioral Health. The latest incident had pushed me over the edge. Despite the toxic work environment, I genuinely wanted to work on myself and improve my mental health. But within minutes of sitting down in her office and trying to explain what I was going through, Lockwood was immediately offended. She leaned forward, her clipboard clutched close to her chest, and asked me in the most condescending way possible:
“Are you the therapist, or am I? You shouldn’t be in the Army.”
From that moment, I regretted not walking out of her office. She maintained that same unprofessional attitude in every session, offering no effort to understand my struggles. Our meetings felt like I was talking to a wall; she provided no feedback, never referenced past conversations, and contributed nothing beyond filling her chair. It was clear she was more invested in showing her Norfolk Terriers as an AKC-registered breeder than in her job at Behavioral Health.
Lockwood was also assigned to lead my group therapy sessions. During one meeting, I mentioned my desire to be stationed in South Korea, hoping to finally practice my MOS without leadership interference. Instead of acknowledging my goal, she reacted as if I had announced I wanted to engage in direct combat with North Korean forces. Thankfully, another soldier in the group corrected her. This overreaction made it painfully clear – Lockwood had no understanding of military life despite working as a therapist on a military base.
I continued attending sessions, but my fear of being discharged grew. I carefully rated our meetings a 5/10 on the mental health screening forms, speaking optimistically about moving forward while my situation at the unit deteriorated. I wanted to leave her care, but I felt trapped.
On March 9, things came to a head. I walked into group therapy heartbroken. After a year of being failed by my NCO, Sergeant Noah Filloramo – who refused to communicate with leadership – I had finally requested reassignment. The result? I was kicked out of my platoon. I had tried to discuss my plan with Lockwood before making the request, but she had shown no interest. Now, instead of offering support, she simply dismissed me: “We’ll talk about this later.”
On March 11, I was finally given an appointment with a psychiatrist, Rosemary Jackson. After explaining my severe anxiety and depression, she reluctantly wrote me a prescription for Fluoxetine. But before handing it over, she remarked, “If you need pills to cope, you shouldn’t be in the Army.”
Despite her words, I took the medication, hoping it would help me move forward. I wanted to serve in a unit where I belonged, where I could contribute. I hoped that by seeking treatment, my leadership would recognize their mistreatment and finally leave me alone. But I was wrong.
On March 17, 2021, my world collapsed. Lockwood sent me a text from her personal number:
“Hello, this is Miss Lockwood at Behavioral Health. Instead of 8 o’clock, I’d like you to come at 9 o’clock so I can do an individual session with you. Let me know if you get this text.”
That morning, I was summoned to my commander’s office, where I was handed a paper stating I would be administratively separated under Chapter 5-17. My commander, Dallas Meachum – a leader so detached that he let his unit fall apart around him—was clearly just following Lockwood’s recommendation. I wasn’t the only one suffering, but I was being singled out.
After signing the paper, I reported to Behavioral Health, where Lockwood explained her reasoning: “The Army isn’t for you.” When I told her I might kill myself after being discharged, she called the emergency hotline and had me quarantined at the inpatient facility at the Naval Medical Center in Portsmouth. That was the last day I seriously took my medication. Soon after, I stopped completely.
The two days I spent in that facility were meaningless. I barely spoke to any therapists. Staff pressured me to call someone from my unit to bring me my personal items. When it was time to leave, we were all handed identical diagnoses: “adjustment disorder with mixed anxiety and depression.”
Upon my release, I immediately called Behavioral Health to cancel my next appointment. I made it crystal clear: I never wanted to see Margaret Lockwood again. For once, they listened.
At that point, I knew I had a fight ahead. I refused to let a toxic unit define my Army experience. In the month I spent under Fort Eustis Behavioral Health’s care, I never received proper therapy, barely started my medication, and wasn’t given an accurate diagnosis. So I did the only thing I could – I filed an OMBUDSMAN report and submitted an ICE complaint.
On March 26, I received their response:
“I have read your concerns and reviewed your records along with other collateral information you provided. I am afraid there are several inconsistencies below from your statement, especially with reference to the care we provide here at BH. The care we provide at BH is at the very highest of standards, and I am sorry you feel the way you expressed yourself. I am aware that you have made an appointment with me to discuss your concerns, and that is the policy for the clinic when a SM feels they are not receiving the care they need or to discuss transfer of care matters. On a final note, we do make clinical recommendations to the unit commanders; however, the final call/decision is your Commander’s, and we have no control over that. I hope this answers some of your concerns, and for a more detailed conversation, we shall meet next week as scheduled. Meanwhile, if you have thoughts of hurting yourself, please walk into BH during work hours or call 911 at other times.”
– Dr. Atmaram Yarlagadda, Installation Director of Psychological Health
Not one of these so-called “inconsistencies” was explained. When I was supposed to receive a call from Dr. Yarlagadda, someone else called in his place—just to schedule me with a new therapist. No investigation. No accountability.
While waiting to be reassigned, I joined group therapy with a different provider – someone who, unlike Lockwood, treated us like patients rather than burdens. She went the extra mile, providing us with resources to help when we lost access to mental healthcare. But despite her efforts, the frustration among soldiers was palpable. One trainee from AIT stood out – on the verge of separation, struggling in a system that had already failed him.
He was doing well in his classes and, like me, wanted to stay in and get better. Unfortunately, his provider had other plans for him. Now he was at the mercy of his command. In addition to him, another soldier also described his provider as being “aggressive” and asked if he could switch with someone else. In all of these sessions, the soldiers were either being separated or had just started receiving care. There was no in-between.
On April 20th, when I learned that I was finally getting a new therapist, I felt like I had hope again. Even though I had already begun the out-processing procedures, from the research I had done I knew it was still possible to cancel my separation and stay in the Army. All it took was a convincing therapist and a commander who cared about his troops. I had a lot of hope that Major Samuel Ochinang would be the type of therapist whom I could finally sit down with and talk about my problems, but all that optimism immediately vanished the moment he opened his mouth. Just like Margaret Lockwood, he showed me his true colors within the first few minutes of meeting him.
From the start, Major Samuel Ochinang was dismissive and condescending. He wouldn’t let me speak. Talking to him felt like scratching nails on a chalkboard, and every word that slipped from his mouth was extremely disrespectful and lacked empathy. When I gave examples of the times I received bad healthcare in the past, like when I was told to eat bananas to treat the occasional debilitating cramps I would get while running, he gaslighted me and asked if I had followed the “treatment plan.” He then tried to use that scenario, the scenario in which I didn’t listen to my doctor, to judge my behavior against my abusers. When I panicked and wanted him to speak to my leadership about staying in the Army so I could focus on making an actual recovery, he refused. All his “therapy” simply amounted to was pulling out a workbook and teaching me about cognitive distortions.
As a result of this, after our first appointment that day, I became extremely depressed to the point that word got out to my commander, who made a command referral to Behavioral Health. I then had to go back and tell another staff member that I wasn’t going to kill myself while thinking about my suicide plan and knowing how badly I wanted to die. At that point, I knew far too well that nobody was going to help me and that if things continued like this, I would just end up at the in-patient hospital again, locked away with no help, re-diagnosed with “adjustment disorder,” and discharged to my abusive unit and assigned the same therapists as before. As usual, not a single person cared to listen or ask if I was OK. They were simply going through the motions and didn’t care if I was dead or alive the next day. The paper I was given for the command referral was never filled out and I was never placed on suicide watch. If I wanted to go back to my barracks room and kill myself, I had every opportunity and reason to do so. If I’d been secretly keeping a gun in my barracks room this entire time, I could’ve easily taken it out and shot myself. If I wanted to hang myself or overdose on pills, it would be easy to run to the store and buy the supplies I needed. My mental health was so bad as a result of going to Behavioral Health that a therapist from MFLC finally relented and allowed me to set up appointments with him. I did my best to schedule them after Ochinang’s.
In many ways, Samuel Ochinang was worse than Margaret Lockwood. While she sat through all our meetings with a pouting face and barely said a word, Ochinang treated me like a regular student who was participating in a study group. When I finally did manage to tell him that teaching me about “cognitive distortions” was, understandably, not doing anything to address the real issues in my life, his next idea was to play a YouTube video and have me meditate. When I told him I couldn’t, he then said my “reactions” were the reason why he wanted to separate me.
At no point in time did he ever take into consideration the fact that he was talking to a suicidal soldier – one whose career was ripped away from them the moment they began therapy. This is why every single time I left his office, I had a full-blown panic attack and wanted to kill myself even more. I would always leave crying because I was so frustrated that I couldn’t get a word in. Ochinang was so obsessed with calling everything a “cognitive distortion” that he forgot a living, breathing patient was sitting right in front of him.
Finally, during our last appointment, when I asked him if I could leave Fort Eustis Behavioral Health and get actual, adequate care somewhere else, he told me he didn’t think it was possible. Therefore, he allowed me to switch to phone appointments with him because he understood just how badly he and Margaret Lockwood made me feel. The simple act of going to the Behavioral Health building felt like a hostage situation; the moment I stepped through those doors, I knew I wouldn’t get the care I needed and it would simply be another appointment full of gaslighting, victim blaming, and personal attacks. That is why I wrote him a four-page letter, describing the abuse I was going through. Because there was no other way I could be heard.
In the meantime, while I was going through all of this, I had to deal with severe retaliation from my unit. My commander, Dallas Meachum, wrote in my files: “She continues to inform every civilian she meets with that she is a victim and that she is not receiving the help she wants from BH or her command. These allegations are false and without truth. She received quality care from her BH team.” This was clearly far from the truth. I was also told by the new first sergeant, Freddie Galloway, that I was just “blaming other people” for everything that I had gone through up to that point. I was even told to shut up by Sergeant Dakota Jones when I was being escorted around because I was desperately reaching out for help during out-processing. My leadership knew I was going to become homeless in a few days, but as usual, nobody cared. To make matters worse, my commander spoke to my MFLC therapist and manipulated him into turning against me. In my darkest moments, I was entirely alone and had nobody to turn to to ask for help. Everyone around me wanted me dead.
Despite how suicidal I was, and how hard it was to stay alive, I continued to fight because I wanted to tell my story. This meant that I had to talk myself off the ledge over and over again, while my toxic leadership and my abusive therapists stood back and watched me suffer with a gleam in their eyes and a pep in their step. I don’t know what I did to attract such extreme hostility, but I knew if I was going to survive this, every decision and every action depended on me. So I would tell myself these three things when I was at my worst:
1. You are alone
2. Nobody will help you
3. You don’t have a unit
To this day, I know two of those statements continue to be true. Even now, several years later, I still struggle with severe PTSD and suicidal ideation and have to constantly live with the weight of the trauma on my shoulders. After what happened to me, I have lost all faith in the mental healthcare industry as a whole and I can never physically step foot in a therapist’s office ever again.
Throughout my four-month-long tour in mental hell, the question was never, “How can I help you?” It was always, “How fast can I separate you?” Not once did a single person ever try to pull me aside and ask me directly for my side of the story. Instead, they constructed their own false narratives surrounding my care, with the only witnesses to the truth being Margaret Lockwood, Samuel Ochinang, and me. Now I fully understand why the stigma against mental healthcare in the Army persists, and it is 100% justified.
But from this tragedy came two new friends, who were also victims of the unit’s toxic leadership, and they became my allies in this fight against our shared abusers. The 558 Transportation Company, which was a part of the 10th Battalion and 7th Brigade, was a living hell for the many individuals who had the misfortune of being assigned to that unit. We all have our own stories to tell, and our combined negative experiences at Fort Eustis Behavioral Health truly emphasized a need for change in a system that doesn’t benefit the soldier. Thankfully, on Oct 17th, 2021, the unit was disbanded. Thus, its awful legacy was permanently laid to rest, and its victims can now have a sense of peace after surviving the storm.
The last phone call I had with Samuel Ochinang took place on May 26th, 2021. During that call, I was turning in my CAC card at the DEERS office; it was my last day in the Army. That was the moment I told him I was now officially homeless.
I still remember what he said to me.
“That’s a cognitive distortion.”
-A