40,000 Potential Tragedies

Research psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey's new book, "The Insanity Offense," describes what he calls "one of the great social disasters of recent American history": the failure to treat the seriously mentally ill. That failure, he argues, not only leaves the sick to suffer without help but also endangers their families and fellow citizens.

Founder of the Arlington-based Treatment Advocacy Center and a former member of staff at Washington's St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital, Torrey tells a story of half a century of well-meant but misguided policies.

First, he argues, came the post-World War II push to move psychiatric patients out of hospitals and place them in communities. Couple that with the conviction widely held among civil rights lawyers in the 1960s that involuntary institutionalization was incompatible with the principles of a free society, and the stage was set: At least 40 state mental hospitals closed, Torrey writes, and there was little aftercare provided for people who suddenly found themselves untreated and often on the street.

Of the 4 million people in the United States who suffer from severe psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia and depression with psychosis, Torrey estimates that

1 percent, or 40,000, are overtly dangerous. These are people who have committed violent acts, he writes, and, if unmedicated, are likely to do so again.

Torrey's is a chilling and provocative tale, told through the lives (and untimely deaths) of the men and women who, he argues, were the victims of these policies. If he ever slowed in his writing, Torrey says, news accounts would provide him with reason to continue -- like the crowded 2006 funeral of a Fairfax County policewoman and mother of two who, he writes, died at the hands of "an eighteen-year-old with seven guns and untreated schizophrenia."

We have the means to rectify this failing, Torrey argues. The question is whether we have the will.

-- Frances Stead Sellers