“This was a very important man,” he stated. “I think she died thinking it was true.”
In the Nineteen Seventies, when the nation was discharging a whole bunch of hundreds of sufferers from public psychiatric hospitals, it was the period of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” and the transfer was lauded as a forward-thinking reform. But Dr. Torrey warned that many former sufferers have been being left wandering metropolis streets untreated, describing them in his writing as “a legion of the inner-city damned.”
He recalled a girl he had encountered whereas treating sufferers at a homeless shelter in Washington, D.C. She struck him as acquainted, so he pulled out her information: A decade earlier, whereas psychotic, she had been handled at St. Elizabeths, the general public psychiatric hospital the place he had labored, after attacking her daughter so brutally that the lady misplaced her arm. The girl had refused treatment as soon as she left the hospital.
“I said, ‘There’s something very wrong with this system,’” he stated. “How is this woman allowed to be completely psychotic again?”
It was uncommon for a psychiatrist to take such a blistering stance in opposition to deinstitutionalization, which been celebrated by liberals. Over the years that adopted, Dr. Torrey stated, his arguments discovered extra help from conservatives, touchdown on the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal.
He went on to problem all the occupation’s energy facilities. He lambasted the National Institutes of Mental Health for funding too little analysis on remedies for debilitating diseases like schizophrenia. He fell out with the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill over his advocacy of outpatient dedication. He refused to pay dues to his native chapter of the American Psychiatric Association — an act of protest over its spending on a lobbyist — and was expelled, he stated.
“I’m a longtime friend and colleague of Fuller’s, but Fuller caused institutional psychiatry a big pain in the butt,” stated Dr. John Talbott, 87, a previous president of the American Psychiatric Association. He traced the friction to deinstitutionalization. “Fuller was one of the few people who said from the very beginning that it was a big mistake. In part, he said it because of his sister.”