E. Fuller Torrey Quotes

United States, Researcher
September 6, 1937

Edwin Fuller Torrey, is an American psychiatrist and schizophrenia researcher. He is Associate Director of Research at the Stanley Medical Research Institute (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 mental illness to be forcibly committed and medicated easily throughout the United States.

“How could so many well-meaning professionals have been so wrong and been complicit in creating such a disaster? This book attempts to answer that question.”

E. Fuller Torrey
The very term ['mental disease'] is nonsensical, a semantic mistake. The two words cannot go together except metaphorically; you can no more have a mental 'disease' than you can have a purple idea or a wise space". Similarly, there can no more be a "mental illness" than there can be a "moral illness." The words "mental" and "illness" do not go together logically. Mental "illness" does not exist, and neither does mental "health." These terms indicate only approval or disapproval of some aspect of a person's mentality (thinking, emotions, or behavior).

E. Fuller Torrey

Mental health courts exist because the system has failed.

E. Fuller Torrey
- People
- Health
- Firsts
Over the years it [the National Committee for Mental Hygiene] has championed for the promotion of 'mental health' despite the fact that nobody knows what it is or how to do it.

E. Fuller Torrey
- Health
- Years
- Facts
“Schizophrenia is a cruel disease. The lives of those affected are often chronicles of constricted experiences, muted emotions, missed opportunities, unfulfilled expectations. It leads to a twilight existence, a twentieth century underground man. The fate of these patients has been worsened by our propensity to misunderstand, our failure to provide adequate treatment and rehabilitation, our meager research efforts. A disease which should be found, in the phrase of T.S. Eliot, in the "frigid purgatorial fires" has become through our ignorance and neglect a living hell.”

E. Fuller Torrey