He is associate director of research at the Stanley Medical Research Institute[1] (SMRI) and founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center (TAC), a nonprofit organization whose principal activity is promoting the passage and implementation of outpatient commitment laws and civil commitment laws and standards in individual states that allow people diagnosed with severe mental illness to be involuntarily hospitalized and treated throughout the United States.
He has been criticized by a range of people, including federal researchers and others for some of his attacks on de-institutionalization and his support for forced medication as a method of treatment.
He became a ward physician at St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C.[5] for nine years, where he reportedly worked with the most challenging patients and aimed to avoid the use of seclusion or restraints on the acute admission units.
Torrey helped build NAMI into a powerful political force through campaigning and donating the hardcover royalties from the sale of his book Surviving Schizophrenia.
"[16] In 2002, NAMI's Executive Director issued a statement highly critical of 60 Minutes for producing a piece entitled "Dr. Torrey's War."
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.
[26] Since then he has published, often with Robert Yolken, more than 30 articles on seasonal variation and possible infectious causes of schizophrenia, focusing especially on Toxoplasma gondii.
He is involved in five or six ongoing studies using anti-Toxoplasmosa gondii agents (e.g. antibiotics such as minocycline and azithromycin[27][28]) as an add-on treatment for schizophrenia.
The hypothesis is not prominent in current mainstream scientific views on the causes of schizophrenia, although infections may be seen as one possible risk factor that could lead to vulnerabilities in early neurodevelopment in some cases.
[29] However, he has criticized community alternatives which do not enforce drug treatment, such as those espoused by many psychiatric survivors and the National Empowerment Center.
[32] Torrey has appeared on national radio and television (outlets like NPR, Oprah, 20/20, 60 Minutes, and Dateline) and has written for many newspapers.
[34] Experts such as Dr. Peter C. Gøtzsche, Dr. Jorun Rugkåsa, James Gottstein, and others have called into question both the evidence basis and ethics of coercive practices such as court-ordered treatment, citing substantial scientific literature and patient testimony showing harm and/or lack of benefit.
[35][36][37][38] The United Nations and its World Health Organization have repeatedly called for the end to coercive interventions in psychiatry, naming them as human rights violations traumatizing significant portions of those affected; instead, they suggest community-based alternatives without threat of force.
[39][36][40][41] Torrey has been charged with acting to limit the voice of those consumers, survivors and ex-patients that he disagrees with, opposing their civil rights and censoring and ridiculing their ideas and those of their supporters.
Torrey has been a long-time critic of the Center for Mental Health Services that provides support and advocacy, on the grounds that they support anti-psychiatry groups and those opposed to outpatient commitment, claiming they neglect the seriously mentally ill due to a hippie '60s attitude, distribute funds on the basis of other factors such as "community cohesion" and ethnic minority involvement, and are more dysfunctional than the individuals they are supposed to help.
Torrey has in general been instrumental in lobbying against, and undermining, community-based consumer projects because they promoted social and experiential recovery and questioned the standard medical model.
[45] Although Torrey described family members as "surviving schizophrenia" in his book of that title, in 1997 he said the term "psychiatric survivor" used by ex-patients to describe themselves was just political correctness and he blamed them, along with civil rights lawyers, for the deaths of half a million people due to suicides and deaths on the street.
[47] In the same journal in 1999, Torrey and Miller of the Stanley Foundation Research Program argued for an incentivised schizophrenia treatment system backed by a credible threat of force, modeled on that used for the fatal infectious disease tuberculosis;[48] replies criticized the logic of the analogy and resort to forced drugging rather than developing alliances and understanding, to which Torrey accused the director and members of MindFreedom International of living off federal funds while denying illness and not caring about the mentally ill on the streets and in prisons.
He has generally linked this to issues of violence, homelessness and medication noncompliance, as well as lack of proper focus by the relevant governmental organizations.
[51] He has been accused of gaining influence by sensationalizing and exaggerating the incidence of violence and its link to medication noncompliance, including disseminating unsubstantiated and unreliable statistics.
[32][52] Others, while agreeing that public mental health care in the U.S. falls far short of what people with serious psychiatric disorders need and deserve, have argued that Torrey's solutions are outdated and that his book The Insanity Offense is based on unsubstantiated portrayals of certainty on the statistics on violence, outpatient commitment and medication, stigmatizing tens of thousands of people, deeply offending and insulting those who hold views differing from his own, and promulgating one-dimensional solutions.