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Washingtonian

December 2001

Text reprinted with permission of the author. Photo reprinted with permission of the photographer. All rights reserved.

Washington's Best and Brightest:
Roots of Mental Illness - E. Fuller Torrey, Psychiatrist

By John Pekkanen

E. Fuller Torrey is crusading to conquer brain diseases.
It's personal - his sister suffers from schizophrenia.

In 1957, during his sophomore year at Princeton, E. Fuller Torrey's 17-year-old sister was diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Psychiatrists told Torrey and his mother that Rhoda's illness had been triggered by the early death of their father. "If it were true," says Torrey, "why didn't I become schizophrenic, too?"

Torrey, a psychiatrist and researcher, is on a mission to conquer schizophrenia and other mental illnesses. Through articles, speeches, and books, he promotes the idea that they aren't caused by family conflict but by diseases of the brain that have a genetic component. He also seeks to help families of people suffering from mental illness. His book Surviving Schizophrenia is considered a bible for caregivers and families of the mentally ill.

Although widely accepted today, his ideas on the origins of mental illness were regarded as heretical 20 years ago. But Torrey has long bucked the tide. As a psychiatrist at St. Elizabeths from 1977 to 1986, he was among the first to sound an alarm that state mental-health systems were pushing seriously ill people onto the street without treatment.

"States had passed well-intentioned laws that allowed people to decide for themselves whether they wanted treatment," Torrey says. "If you want a definition of insanity, that's it."

Torrey's most enduring legacy may spring from his current research. It began in 1973 when he published a paper reviving a century-old idea that mental illnesses such as schizophrenia might be triggered by infection.

The notion was given little credence, but Torrey persisted. While acknowledging that genes played a role, he believed that an infectious process such as a virus acted on predisposed genes to trigger illness.

Today Torrey directs the Bethesda-based Stanley Foundation Research Programs, where he dispenses grants for research on schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, the two most common psychiatric diseases. The research has found a higher-than-average incidence of infectious disease among people with schizophrenia.

The payoff if Torrey's theory proves correct? "We might be able to intervene early and prevent these terrible diseases from ever getting started."

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