Wrong Prescription

How the emptying of state-run mental hospitals produced a social disaster

From the June 14th edition of The Wall Street Journal:

By Paul McHugh

The Insanity Offense
By E. Fuller Torrey
Norton, 265 pages, $24.95

There are times and situations that call for prophets. Not fortunetellers or soothsayers, but biblical prophets like Amos or Jeremiah who furiously proclaim the old truths, puncture our pretensions and predict from current tribulations worse to come if what lies deeper than sin -- idolatrous worship of false gods -- continues. E. Fuller Torrey, a psychiatrist who cares for patients with schizophrenia and manic-depression, is to my mind the doctor nearest in character to an ancient Hebrew prophet.

In "The Insanity Offense," he describes the grim consequences -- in death, violence and suffering -- of laws that, beginning in the late 1960s, released the seriously mentally ill from the oversight of state mental-health services and permitted them to wander away from the treatment and protection they desperately needed. Dr. Torrey identifies an unholy alliance of rash conservatives seeking to save public money by abandoning a traditional state obligation and self-righteous liberals defining the neglect of these patients as "defending their civil rights." We need prophets to confront such alliances -- anything less will fail -- and in this splendid book we hear one.

To read the entire article, click here.

For a book excerpt from the The Insanity Offense, click here.