National Alliance On Mental Illness
Torrey was for many years an active advisor for the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). Parents felt that he spoke up for them when much of the medical establishment had previously held that parenting was responsible for schizophrenia. Torrey helped build NAMI into a powerful political force through campaigning and donating the hardcover royalties from the sale of his book "Surviving Schizophrenia".
Although Torrey, TAC, and NAMI remain aligned, NAMI may have tried to distance itself from TAC in 1998. One source The Psychiatric Times, reported that TAC was designed from the start to be "a separate support organization with its own source of funding." According to MindFreedom International, an association of survivors of psychiatric treatment opposed to involuntary treatment, NAMI severed its relationship with TAC because of pressure from groups opposed to Torrey both from within NAMI and outside NAMI. Torrey is, according to MindFreedom, one of 'the most feverishly pro-force psychiatrists in the world'. MindFreedom suggests that the 'links between NAMI and TAC are simply going from overt to covert.'
In 2002, NAMI's Executive Director issued a statement highly critical of 60 Minutes for producing a piece entitled "Dr. Torrey's War." In the statement, NAMI alternately criticized and backed various positions espoused by Torrey while aiming its criticism at 60 Minutes for what NAMI called "sound bite journalism." .
Torrey was also the keynote speaker at the 23rd annual NAMI convention in 2002. .
In 2005, NAMI gave Dr. Torrey a tribute on its 25th Anniversary Celebratory Donor Wall, for those who have donated over $25,000. It called him a groundbreaking researcher, a ferociously resolute advocate, a prominent and admired author of dozens of books and a dedicated practicing clinician, and said that he had "touched the lives of countless NAMI members throughout this nation."
NAMI has some continuing links to TAC via their board of directors. One individual, Frederick Frese, is presently on both the NAMI and TAC boards. TAC has two other former NAMI board members on their board and Laurie Flynn, the former NAMI executive director, is part of the TAC Honorary Advisory Committee.
In 2008, Torrey disagreed with a NAMI view on second-generation antipsychotics and accused the medical director and executive director of failing to disclose conflicts of interest, because they are employees of an organization that receives more than half its budget from pharmaceutical companies. He argued they were not representing the views of many members of NAMI including himself.
Read more about this topic: E. Fuller Torrey
Famous quotes containing the words national, alliance, mental and/or illness:
“It is not unkind to say, from the standpoint of scenery alone, that if many, and indeed most, of our American national parks were to be set down on the continent of Europe thousands of Americans would journey all the way across the ocean in order to see their beauties.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“Racism as a form of skin worship, and as a sickness and a pathological anxiety for America, is so great, until the poor whites—rather than fighting for jobs or education—fight to remain pink and fight to remain white. And therefore they cannot see an alliance with people that they feel to be inherently inferior.”
—Jesse Jackson (b. 1941)
“One who shows signs of mental aberration is, inevitably, perhaps, but cruelly, shut off from familiar, thoughtless intercourse, partly excommunicated; his isolation is unwittingly proclaimed to him on every countenance by curiosity, indifference, aversion, or pity, and in so far as he is human enough to need free and equal communication and feel the lack of it, he suffers pain and loss of a kind and degree which others can only faintly imagine, and for the most part ignore.”
—Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)
“For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by inoculating them with the virus that is a thousand times more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)