(12-15-2022) A few weeks ago, New York Times Reporter Ellen Barry sent me an email asking if I would confirm some of the many stories that she had heard about Dr. E. Fuller Torrey. I was happy to oblige. She published her report this week and it has generated more than a 1,000 comments – which is not surprising given how controversial and influential Dr. Torrey has been pushing states to adopt Assisted Outpatient Treatment. What’s your view?
Behind New York City’s Shift on Mental Health, a Solitary Quest
The psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey has been advocating tougher involuntary psychiatric treatment policies for 40 years. Now it’s paying off.
BETHESDA, Md. — The psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey is 85 years old and has Parkinson’s disease, the tremors at times so strong that his hand beats like a drum on the table.
Still, every morning when he reads the newspapers, he looks for accounts of violent behavior by people with severe mental illness, to add to an archive he has maintained since the 1980s.
His records include reports of people who, in the grip of psychosis, assaulted political figures or pushed strangers into the path of subway trains; parents who, while delusional, killed their children by smothering, drowning or beating them; adult children who, while off medication, killed their parents with swords, axes or hammers.