Watkins v. Halco Engineering, Inc., 820546

• Decision Date: 11 March 1983
• Docket Number: No. 820546,820546
• Citation: 300 S.E.2d 761,225 Va. 97
• Parties: Wesley WATKINS v. HALCO ENGINEERING, INC., et al. Record
• Court: Virginia Supreme Court

Page 761

300 S.E.2d 761

225 Va. 97

Wesley WATKINS v. HALCO ENGINEERING, INC., et al.

Record No. 820546.

Supreme Court of Virginia.

March 11, 1983.

J. Hunt Brasfield, Alexandria (Ashcraft & Gerel, Alexandria, on brief), for appellant.

Mary Louise Kramer, Richmond (Roger L. Williams, Sands, Anderson, Marks & Miller, Richmond, on brief), for appellees.

Before CARRICO, C.J., and COCHRAN, POFF, COMPTON, THOMPSON, ^* STEPHENSON and RUSSELL, JJ.

COMPTON, Justice.

In this workmen's compensation case, the sole issue is whether the Industrial Commission properly refused to order the employer to pay for psychiatric services rendered the claimant following a back injury.

Appellant Wesley Watkins sustained injuries to his lower back in an industrial accident in January of 1979. He fell while working in Arlington as a welder for appellee Halco Engineering, Inc. The injury was accepted as compensable by the employer and its insurer, appellee Aetna Insurance Company (collectively, the employer). Pursuant to awards of the Commission, the claimant subsequently received compensation for periods of temporary total disability caused by his injury, diagnosed as a back sprain.

Because of persistent back pain, Watkins was unable to perform the duties of a welder after the accident. In about January of 1980, the claimant, age 32, enrolled in Northern Virginia Community College, with the encouragement of his physician, "to carry out a long-standing desire to achieve a college degree" and to further his education so that he could qualify for less strenuous employment. At college, however, he was "unable to sustain interest and attention, sometimes because of back pain ... at other times, because he [felt] depressed or hopeless." His grades were poor he dropped courses, and he felt "increasingly like a failure."

Due to these school difficulties, claimant's treating orthopedic surgeon referred him in June of 1981 to Dr. William F. Cavender, an Alexandria psychiatrist. Upon examination, Cavender diagnosed claimant's condition as "Adjustment Disorder with Academic Inhibition ... manifested by depression and inability to study." Cavender reported that Watkins suffered stress caused by "ongoing pain and loss of work ability resulting from the accident."

During the October 1981 hearing before a deputy commissioner on claimant's demand that the employer pay for Cavender's services, the psychiatrist testified about the cause of Watkins' condition as follows:

"Well, he was working as a welder making a nice income, able to support himself and then subsequent to the injury he went on disability with a significant change in his income and [was] advised not to return to welding. He was then faced with another way of making a living. He wanted to do that in the business world, and had to go back to school at the college level to do that and encountered significant difficulty in concentrating and studying and maintaining his self-esteem. So, he went from a situation in which he was reasonably comfortable in making a good income to a situation in which he had a much lesser income and which he had some pain and which he was having some considerable difficulty in completing the ... school work that would enable him to have another occupation."

Cavender then instituted a course of treatment, which he described as follows:

"I've seen him approximately twice a week ... after the initial period in which I took a thorough history. I [began] to teach him a relaxation technique and to use some imagery. The relaxation technique being for the purpose of allowing him to experience in his imagination and in his memory the things that impede his studying, ... to allow him to experience that in a relaxed state and to envision himself successfully studying and opening his mind and letting the material in, and allowing that material to come forth at examination time and that's sort of a modified technique of reciprocal inhibition. That's a behavioral technique."

At the time of the hearing, Cavender's bill amounted to $1600, based on a rate of $65 per 50-minute session of "individual psychotherapy."

In a November 1981 opinion, the deputy commissioner concluded that the "adjustment disorder with academic inhibition" suffered by Watkins was not causally related to the claimant's accident. Noting Cavender testified that his principal goal was to assist Watkins in satisfactorily completing college and that claimant's condition was one experienced by the general population, the deputy found that "the psychiatric treatment and psychotherapy" provided by Cavender was "neither reasonable nor necessary medical treatment related to claimant's industrial accident but merely treatment for an ordinary disease of life." Upon review, the full Commission unanimously agreed with the deputy's decision that the employer was...