E. Fuller Torrey

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E. Fuller Torrey bigraphy, stories - American psychiatrist

E. Fuller Torrey : biography

September 6, 1937 –

Edwin Fuller Torrey, M.D. (born September 6, 1937, Utica, New York), is an American psychiatrist and schizophrenia researcher. He is executive director of the Stanley Medical Research Institute (SMRI) and founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center (TAC), a nonprofit organization with the goals of eliminating legal and clinical obstacles to the treatment of severe mental illness.

Torrey has conducted numerous research studies, particularly on possible infectious causes of schizophrenia. He has become well known as an advocate of the idea that severe mental illness is due to biological factors and not social factors.Princeton Alumni News, 11/5/2003 He has appeared on national radio and television outlets and written for many newspapers. He has received two Commendation Medals by the U.S. Public Health Service and numerous other awards and tributes. He has been criticized by a range of people, including federal researchers and others for some of his attacks on de-institutionalization and his support for forced medication as a method of treatment. He has also been described as having a black-and-white view of mental illness and as being iconoclastic, dogmatic, single-minded and a renegade.

Torrey is on the board of the Treatment Advocacy Center (TAC), which describes itself as being "a national nonprofit advocacy organization. TAC supports involuntary treatment when deemed appropriate by a judge (at the urging of the person’s psychiatrist and family members). Torrey has written several best-selling books on mental illness, including Surviving Schizophrenia.

Education and early career

Torrey earned his bachelor’s degree, magna cum laude, from Princeton University, and his medical doctor’s degree from the McGill University School of Medicine. Torrey also earned a master’s degree in anthropology from Stanford University, and was trained in psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine. At McGill and later at Stanford, he was exposed to a biological approach and recalls that one of his first-year instructors at McGill was Heinz Lehmann, the first clinician in North America to use the first antipsychotic, chlorpromazine. The medical school was housed next door to the Montreal Neurological Institute, a premier neuroscience center.

Torrey then practiced general medicine in Ethiopia for two years as a Peace Corps physician and in the South Bronx. From 1970 to 1975, he was a special administrative assistant to the NIMH director. He then worked for year in Alaska in the Indian Health Service. He then became a ward physician at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the mentally ill in Washington, D.C. for nine years, where he reportedly worked with the most challenging patients and aimed to avoid the use of seclusion or restraints on the acute admission units. He also volunteered at Washington homeless clinics.

Criticism

Torrey has criticized many organizations. He has charged the National Institute of Mental Health with not concentrating its resources sufficiently on severe mental illness and directly applicable research; NIMH has disputed his statistics and viewpoint.

Torrey has been charged with acting to limit the voice of those consumers, survivors and ex-patients that he disagrees with, opposing their civil rights and censoring and ridiculing their ideas and those of their supporters. Torrey has been a long-time critic of the Center for Mental Health Services that provides support and advocacy, on the grounds that they support anti-psychiatry groups and those opposed to outpatient commitment, claiming they neglect the seriously mentally ill due to a hippie 60s attitude, distributing funds on the basis of other factors such as "community cohesion" and ethnic minority involvement, and being more dysfunctional than the individuals it is supposed to help. He has specifically opposed public funding for the National Empowerment Center, for rejecting the medical model and arguing for a recovery model without necessarily needing medication; it has since lost its funding from the CMHS. Torrey has in general been instrumental in lobbying against, and undermining, community-based consumer projects because they promoted social and experiential recovery and questioned the standard medical model. Consumer organizations have protested that they are already economically disadvantaged and vulnerable to political whim while Torrey and his organizations have rich and powerful backers.McLean, A. (2003) International Journal of Psychosocial Rehabilitation. 8, 58-70. It has been argued that Torrey and other psychiatric and family member advocates do not necessarily have the same interests as consumers/survivors themselves. Differences in ideology sharpened after the development of NAMI.McLean, A. (2003). International Journal of Psychosocial Rehabilitation. 8, 47-57 In criticizing the New freedom commission on mental health for not recommending forced outpatient medicating, Torrey claimed that stigma against people with mental disorders was largely due to them committing violent acts due to not taking medication, and called the recovery model harmful for sending a cruel message of hope, or implicit blame, to those he believes cannot engage in a recovery process, despite being a laudable long-term vision for the Commission.Torrey (2003) Newswire. Retrieved on Aug 12 2008 Torrey hopes to live long enough to see vaccines to prevent many or most cases of schizophrenia.