Behind New York City’s Shift on Mental Health, a Solitary Quest

[Jaybee00]

Schizophrenia, Not MECFS, but interesting.


It is, perhaps, no surprise that Dr. Torrey became an outlier in his profession. He was a sophomore at Princeton when his mother called to tell him something was wrong with his sister, Rhoda, who had just turned 18 and was due to start college in the fall. She was lying on the front lawn, shouting, “The British are coming!”

He accompanied his mother to meetings with eminent psychiatrists, who lectured them on the possible causes of his sister’s schizophrenia. The chief of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital suggested it was the trauma of his father’s death. The chairman of Columbia’s psychiatry department pointed to “family problems.”

“I knew it was nonsense from the beginning,” he said. “It made no sense whatsoever.”

Later, when he became a psychiatrist himself, Dr. Torrey fantasized about rounding up all the psychiatrists “who had these nonsense theories” and putting them on trial in a football stadium full of patients’ families. As a researcher, he plunged into the task of searching for biological causes for the disease. But it was too late for his mother, who took the Columbia chairman’s word for it.


https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/11/...vgAYExgnCPW74w79Kk4WL_psL7eSow&smid=share-url

 

[bobbler]

This is a very complicated article - covering a lot of angles and issues, not all really at all as you would think from this abstract in the context of here (our experience of ME). ie the rest of the article deviates in a totally different turn from what you make take from just reading the above bit?

The guy is big on pushing for laws of compulsory treatment in certain situations etc. and has his views on whether people 'do better in group homes rather than living alone'.

I don't know enough without doing more research than I have energy I'm sure I wish to devote to have views on whether his suggestion he thinks Schizophrenia might be related to a parasite is based on research he's even done or just his opinion.

But the rest focuses less on if he is working on treatments or whatever and more towards controlling how they live their lives which was a departure (particularly the stuff about violence and laws) from what I was initially expecting.

Dr. Torrey, who has done pioneering research into the biological basis of schizophrenia, has used these stories in service of an argument: that it was a mistake for the United States to shut down its public psychiatric hospitals without adequate follow-up care. And that to remedy this, the government should create systems to compel seriously mentally ill people in the community to get treatment.

For much of his career, Dr. Torrey was a lonely voice on this issue, disavowed by patient advocacy groups and by organized psychiatry. But his ideas are now animating major policy shifts, including the announcement by Mayor Eric Adams of New York last month that city officials would send people with untreated mental illnesses to hospitals, even if they posed no threat to others.

I don't know how his assertion of science is in the bit above, or relates to the ideas and campaigns in the rest of it. Or why it would justify his ideas. The piece focuses a lot on his policy and campaign work rather than unbundling how robust his scientific origin ideas are in this piece?