E. Fuller Torrey

NAMI has some continuing links to TAC via their board of directors. Frederick Frese, a psychologist who died in 2018, was 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.

The Stanley Medical Institute in Bethesda, Maryland has collected around 600 brains as of 2008

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.

In 2005, NAMI gave 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."

As of 2004 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.

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.

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.'

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. His comments elicited a record number of letters in response, some in favour of Torrey but most against. The accusations have been described as inflammatory and completely unsubstantiated, and issues of self-determination and self-identity said to be more complex than Torrey realizes. 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; 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.

Torrey has appeared on national radio and television (outlets like NPR, Oprah, 20/20, 60 Minutes, and Dateline) and has written for many newspapers. He has received a 1984 Special Families Award from NAMI, two Commendation Medals from the U.S. Public Health Service, a 1991 National Caring Award, and a humanitarian award from NARSAD (now known as the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation). In 1999, he received a research award from the International Congress of Schizophrenia. In 2005, a tribute to Torrey was included in NAMI's 25th Anniversary Celebratory Donor Wall.

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.

Torrey was principal investigator of a NIMH Schizophrenia/Bipolar Disorder Twin Study conducted at the Neuroscience center of St Elizabeth's Hospital in the late 1980s/early 1990s, and copublished more than a dozen studies on structural brain differences between affected and unaffected siblings. He differed from his collaborators in arguing that the genetic heritability of schizophrenia was lower than typically estimated. A review of Torrey's data analysis, however, suggested he had erroneously compared different sorts of concordance statistics.

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.

In the early 1970s, Torrey became interested in viral infections as possible causes of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, particularly a parasite Toxoplasma gondii whose definitive host is the cat, but whose intermediate host can be any mammal, including humans. Up to one third of the world's human population is estimated to carry a Toxoplasma infection. 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) as an add-on treatment for schizophrenia. He believes that infectious causes will eventually explain the "vast majority" of schizophrenia cases. Some of his collaborators have disagreed with the emphasis he has placed on infection as a direct causal factor. Many of the research studies on links between schizophrenia and Toxoplasma gondii, by different authors in different countries, are funded and supported by the Stanley Medical Research Institute. 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.

Torrey has been criticized by, and has criticized, Thomas Szasz, a libertarian psychiatrist and author of The Myth of Mental Illness (1961), who is opposed to involuntary treatment. Torrey has said he admires Szasz for his outspoken criticisms of many psychiatric practices, including "diagnostic creep" (disease mongering) and the potential for the political abuse of psychiatric labels, but he has criticized Szasz for asserting that schizophrenia is not an organic disease of the brain like, for example, Parkinson's disease or multiple sclerosis.

In the 1950s, it was commonly thought that schizophrenia was caused by 'bad parenting'. Torrey has argued that this theory had a toxic effect on parents. His sister had severe schizophrenia and spent most of five decades in hospitals and nursing homes until her death.

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.