E. Fuller Torrey, M.D., Longtime Fierce Advocate for People With SMI, to Deliver IPS Keynote

E. Fuller Torrey, M.D., founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center in Washington, D.C., and associate director for research at the Stanley Medical Research Institute, will deliver the keynote address at this year’s IPS: The Mental Health Services Conference in New York.

Torrey, who is also a professor of psychiatry at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, has for decades been a fierce advocate for the seriously mentally ill in the public sector.

From 1976 to 1985, Torrey was on the clinical staff of St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., where he specialized in the treatment of people with severe psychiatric disorders. From 1988 to 1992, Torrey directed a study of identical twins with schizophrenia and severe bipolar disorder. His work at the Stanley Medical Research Institute includes participating in ongoing collaborative research on viruses and other infectious agents as a cause of these diseases.

Torrey received a 2014 Special Presidential Commendation from APA. He has also received two Commendation Medals from the U.S. Public Health Service, a 1984 Special Families Award from the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), and a 2005 tribute included in NAMI’s 25th Anniversary Celebratory Donor Wall.

In a 2007 Psychiatric News profile, past APA Trustee Roger Peele, M.D., said of Torrey, “Fuller gets as much credit as anyone for moving American psychiatry from a psychoanalytic foundation to a biological one. His provocative books … contributed to a focus on the biological. He is combative—when public agency chiefs heard he was due to be on national TV, they ran to their bunkers—and he has used pithy public pronouncements to hammer home the need for public research monies to be devoted to a biological understanding of people with the most disabling of psychiatric illnesses.”

It was Peele who, as chair of the Department of Psychiatry at St. Elizabeths, hired Torrey as a staff psychiatrist in 1977.

In comments to Psychiatric News, Torrey said he planned to use his keynote address to look at the history of treatment of patients with serious mental illness in the public sector and how that history has shaped many of the challenges and problems today.

“My talk will review the mistakes we made in the 1960s when we set up the rules for deinstitutionalization and the community mental health centers,” Torrey said. “It ties these mistakes directly to the problems we have today in the public mental health sector. It is based on a premise that we can’t really solve the problems unless we can understand their origins.” ■