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MEDIA ADVISORY
Treatment Advocacy Center

PSYCHIATRIST E. FULLER TORREY FEATURED ON "60 MINUTES"
Highlights his research and advocacy for those with severe mental illnesses

ARLINGTON, VA - Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, president of the national nonprofit Treatment Advocacy Center, will be featured on the CBS news magazine "60 Minutes" at 7 p.m. EST this Sunday, April 21, 2002.

In the segment, Dr. Torrey, author of 18 books and more than 200 lay and professional papers, discusses the failure of the National Institutes of Mental Health to appropriately spend taxpayer funds on researching severe mental illnesses, instead allowing funding to go for research projects on things like how pigeons make decisions. The Treatment Advocacy Center released an indepth report in 2000 documenting that only 22.1 percent of NIMH's 1999 research grants were related to the most severe disorders and only 8.3 of the institute's funding went to the clinical or treatment aspects of these illnesses. As Dr. Torrey tells Morley Safer, this is the case in spite of the fact that " … schizophrenia and manic depressive illness alone cost the federal government about $40 billion a year."

The full report is available on the Treatment Advocacy Center website at www.treatmentadvocacycenter.org.

Dr. Torrey founded the Treatment Advocacy Center in 1997 to eliminate barriers to timely and humane treatment for millions of Americans with severe mental illnesses. An estimated 40 percent of the 4.5 million individuals with schizophrenia and manic-depressive illness (bipolar disorder), an estimated 1.8 million people, are not being treated for their illness at any given time. The Treatment Advocacy Center is working on the national, state, and local levels to educate civic, legal, criminal justice, and legislative communities on the benefits of assisted treatment in an effort to decrease homelessness, jailings, suicide, violence and other devastating consequences of lack of treatment.

Dr. Torrey is also the president of the Stanley Foundation Research Programs, the largest private provider of research on schizophrenia and bipolar disorder in the United States. SFRP funds approximately half of all U.S. research on bipolar disorder and approximately one quarter of the research on schizophrenia.

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ADDITIONAL INFO
NIMH's failure to support sufficient research on severe mental illnesses | consequences of lack of treatment
about the Treatment Advocacy Center | full bio of Dr. Torrey with photo
Good Morning America special report: "You paid for it"

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