Edwin Fuller Torrey (born September 6, 1937), 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.
Torrey has conducted numerous research studies, particularly on possible infectious causes of schizophrenia. He has become well known as an advocate of the idea that severe mental illness, psychosis, is due to biological factors and not social factors as may be found in neurotic illnesses. He has appeared on national radio and television outlets and written for many newspapers. He has received two Commendation Medals by the U.S. Public Health Service along with other awards and tributes. 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.
Torrey is on the board of the Treatment Advocacy Center (TAC), which describes itself as being "a national nonprofit advocacy organization". TAC supports involuntary treatment when deemed appropriate by a judge (at the urging of the person's psychiatrist and family members). Torrey has written several books on mental illness, including Surviving Schizophrenia. He is a distant relative of abolitionist Charles Turner Torrey and has written his biography.
Education and early career
Torrey earned his bachelor's degree from Princeton University, and his M.D. from the McGill University Faculty of Medicine. Torrey also earned a master's degree in anthropology from Stanford University, and was trained in psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine. At McGill and later at Stanford, he was exposed to a biological approach and recalls that one of his first-year instructors at McGill was Heinz Lehmann, the first clinician in North America to use the first neuroleptic medication, chlorpromazine.
Torrey practiced general medicine in Ethiopia for two years as a Peace Corps physician followed by practiced in the South Bronx, US. From 1970 to 1975, he was a special administrative assistant to the National Institute of Mental Health director. He then worked for a year in Alaska in the Indian Health Service. He became a ward physician at St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C. 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. He also volunteered at Washington, D.C. homeless clinics.
Stanley Medical Research Institute
Torrey is the founder and executive director of the Stanley Medical Research Institute (SMRI), a large, private entity for conducting research on schizophrenia and bipolar disorder in the U.S. SMRI also maintains a collection of postmortem brain tissue from individuals with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depression and from unaffected controls, which are made available to researchers without charge.
After reading Torrey's book Surviving Schizophrenia, Theodore Stanley, a businessman who had made a fortune in direct-mail marketing and whose son had been diagnosed in the late 1980s with bipolar disorder, contacted Torrey and he and his wife provided the funds for the new institute.
the Stanley Institute had 30 employees and funded half of all U.S. research on bipolar disorder and about a quarter of all schizophrenia research. In 2003 the institute's research budget was around $40 million, 74 percent of which was given out to other researchers through grants. As of 2008 SMRI reported that 75% of its expenditure goes towards the development of new treatments.
The Stanley Medical Institute in Bethesda, Maryland has collected around 600 brains as of 2008
The SMRI has been sued for allegedly taking brains for use in research without proper consent. One lawsuit was settled out of court.
SMRI reports that it has a close relationship with and is the supporting organization for the Treatment Advocacy Center (TAC).