Treatment Advocacy Center - History

History

Research psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey founded the Treatment Advocacy Center in 1998 as a function of the National Association on Mental Illness (NAMI). For nearly 10 years in the decade after the widespread elimination of psychiatric hospital beds in the United States, Torrey had been a psychiatrist at St. Elizabeth's Hospital for the treatment of serious and persistent mental illness in Washington, D.C. There, he frequently treated patients who did not consider themselves to be ill but who were nonetheless determined to be displaying symptoms of mental illness by mental health professionals. He stated that individuals who would have been hospitalized prior to the closing of state psychiatric hospitals (a trend known as “deinstitutionalization”) were increasingly being migrated into jails and prisons because of behaviors that resulted from their non-treatment. With the backing of entrepreneur Theodore Stanley and his wife Vada, the Treatment Advocacy Center separated from NAMI shortly after its founding to focus entirely on removing legal barriers to treatment for those with the most severe mental illnesses.

The Treatment Advocacy Center is a leading proponent for legal revision of laws safeguarding citizens from involuntary commitment and standards and posits itself as a source of authoritative research on issues arising from untreated severe mental illness. The organization operates independently via the support of the Stanley Medical Research Institute, the largest nongovernment source of funding for research into bipolar disorder and schizophrenia in the United States. Torrey continues to serve as a member of the Treatment Advocacy Center’s board and is executive director of the Stanley Medical Research Institute.

Read more about this topic:  Treatment Advocacy Center

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now.
    Richard M. Nixon (b. 1913)

    So in accepting the leading of the sentiments, it is not what we believe concerning the immortality of the soul, or the like, but the universal impulse to believe, that is the material circumstance, and is the principal fact in this history of the globe.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted me.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)