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:
“The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“History takes time.... History makes memory.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“The history of his present majesty, is a history of unremitting injuries and usurpations ... all of which have in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world, for the truth of which we pledge a faith yet unsullied by falsehood.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)