People with mental illness, yet no substance abuse problem, are as peaceful as the general population.
Treatment Advocacy Center (TAC) is a Beltway offshoot of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI), an advocacy group consisting largely consumers of mental health services and their families. Its funding comes almost entirely from the Theodore and Veda Stanley Family Foundation. Since the late 1980s, the Stanley Family has spent more than $20 million for research into the causes of schizophrenia and bi-polar illnesses, as well as the benefits of unconventional drug therapies. But the Stanley Foundation is not known for its scientific achievements as much as it is for its most prominent spokesperson, psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey.
As president of TAC, and executive director of Stanley Research, Torrey is a man with a mission: to force people with schizophrenia and manic-depressive illness into involuntary treatment. Once considered the patron saint of the family advocacy movement, his clamor for involuntary outpatient treatment in the last five years has dimmed his leadership and threatened the coherence of the movement he helped shape (Mental Health Weekly, 2/19/01).
Torrey explains his obsession with forcing people into treatment--it even crept into testimony about homelessness before the House Committee on Banking and Financial Services (3/5/97)--by discussing a unique category of "untreated" people with schizophrenia and bi-polar disorders, a category he created that remains unrecognized in both government and academic research. These folks, he says, are responsible for 20 murders a week, 1,000 a year.
The National Stigma Clearinghouse, which monitors reports of mental illness and alleged violence, challenges TAC's message. According to a letter to the editor Clearinghouse director Jean Arnold wrote to Behavioral Healthcare Tomorrow (4/00), "Actual acts of violence by psychiatric survivors are few and far between. TAC embellishes each episode with bogus homicide numbers."
Others at TAC have acknowledged that the focus on the violence of the mentally ill is in part a cynical ploy to encourage funding for treatment. "People care about public safety," TAC publicist D.J. Jaffee told a workshop at the 1999 meetings of NAMI. "Once you understand that, it means that you have to take the debate out of the mental health arena and put it in the criminal justice/public safety arena." He had earlier advised a local New York advocacy group (SIAMI Newsletter, Vol. 9/12, 1994), "It may be necessary to capitalize on the fear of violence."
To accomplish this goal, TAC has devised a strategy to romance the press--producing material for soundbites, scenarios and statistics that can be used to pitch to the media. These efforts have borne results. Dan Rather led with "1,000 homicides" on a 48 Hours broadcast (4/12/00); Lesley Stahl included it on 60 Minutes (5/7/00). Judging by several dozen op-ed pieces on editorial pages in the last three years, TAC's tactics seem to work.
One gambit involves carefully timing op-ed pieces to appear after specific incidents involving a mentally ill person in a violent episode. After a mentally ill woman was killed by a police officer in California, allegedly in self-defense, several TAC op-eds appeared around the state, beginning with the Los Angeles Times (5/27/00). Later, while the state legislature debated legalizing forced treatment, two more appeared ( San Diego Union-Tribune, 2/16/00; San Francisco Chronicle, 7/6/00).
When the bill failed, Torrey and Mary T. Zdanowicz, TAC's president and executive director, wrote another L.A. Times op-ed (11/13/00), which concluded, "Perhaps next year, policymakers will come to understand that being psychotic can be deadly." This was a time-tested formula for them: The month before, a piece of theirs in the Orlando Sentinel (10/27/00) ended with, "When will Florida legislators realize that being psychotic is mindless and deadly?" And before that, in the Salt Lake City Tribune (4/16/00): "How many more preventable tragedies must Utahans bear before lawmakers realize that being psychotic is mindless and deadly?"
Part of TAC's successful strategy for linking mental illness with violence rests on a press corps that has welcomed stale soundbites used for political purposes. As New York Times columnist Frank Rich (7/29/98) wrote in the aftermath of one high-profile incident, "It's not only politicians who are complicit in this discrimination [against the mentally ill]. The media sometimes compound the ignorance that feeds it."
