In November 2022, Mayor Eric Adams of New York announced that even when the mentally ill homeless pose no threat to others city, officials can sweep them up and deliver them to hospitals. New York City’s Civilian Complaint Review Board already receives hundreds of complaints against the police each year from individuals brought to hospitals against their will. The directive’s impact on civil liberties, not to mention the already helpless homeless, promises to be even more dire. Who is behind this fiasco?
I ask this question as someone who spent years investigating a little-known aspect of the history of psychiatry—the rise and fall of the homeopathic asylums and sanitariums. That history provides a portrait of the “insane”—or the “seriously mentally ill—much at odds with the societal picture today of homeless people with schizophrenia who are a threat to public safety. In the pre-psycho-pharm era mental illness signified a loss of wherewithal in the face of life challenges.
Rather than an inborn problem insanity was a pitiable condition caused by a combination of factors such as exhaustion, inebriation, improper thinking, and bad habits. Given rest, decent nutrition, homeopathy, instruction in moral hygiene, engagement in fruitful activity, and a dose of humor (the nurses offered “giggle” classes) these could be dealt with. An asylum superintendent in Middletown New York noticed that watching baseball benefitted sanity, so he created a powerhouse team to represent his hospital. On days when patients spectated their team’s (the Asylums) games against other institutions or visiting major league squads it was documented that the patients were markedly better.
A farce to be reckoned with
Getting back to New York City, the doctor who, having gained Mayor Adams’s ear, promotes this regressive agenda garnering front-page attention in the New York Times of 12/11/22 is E. Fuller Torrey. Click Here for Video.
A psychiatrist obsessed with violence among the mentally ill, Dr. Torrey is dedicated to their involuntary hospitalization. The apparent reason for his crusade is that, once upon a time, psychoanalysis failed to cure his sister, Rhoda, of schizophrenia. He might have sought other horses to flog. As readers of the Compendium of Madness Perspectives (an appendix in my book, Sane Asylums, The Success of Homeopathy Before Psychiatry Lost Its Mind) know, a multitude of theories, models, cultural vantage points and treatments other than psychoanalysis have their own perspectives on what we call schizophrenia.
A red flag?
Torrey is a Janus, a man with more than one face.
With the 1984 publication of his book, Delusions, The Roots of Treason: Ezra Pound and the Secret of St. Elizabeth’s, the public was introduced to a Dr. Torrey having little in common with today’s version. A psychiatrist on staff at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., where the fascist poet Ezra Pound was held, Dr. Torrey joined forces with the renowned anti-psychiatrists of his day–Thomas Szasz, R.D. Laing, and Robert Coles–to oppose a view, held by the literary establishment and by his own psychiatric colleagues, that Pound was mentally ill.
Come again? In 1984 a homeopathic head of psychiatry?
Oh, brave new world! Among those that Dr. Torrey butted heads with was Dr. Winfred Overholser, a homeopathic physician and superintendent of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., the most prestigious of the psychiatrists who declared Pound insane. A former president of the New England Society of Psychiatrists and the Massachusetts Psychiatric Society, Overholser, in 1947, became president of the American Psychiatric Association.
Psychoanalysis’ hash is settled
Having settled the hash of psychoanalysis, an updated edition of Dr. Torrey set about beating the drum for what, in his mind, remained head-shrinking’s sole rival, the myth that a biological basis for psychosis and schizophrenia exists, promulgated by the psycho-pharmaceutical complex.
The nonexistence of such a link is convincingly shown by evidence drawn directly from psycho-pharmacological research. For having brought the information to light we have to thank Robert Whitaker, author of Mad in America, and Anatomy of an Epidemic, as well as Eliot Valenstein, author of Blaming the Brain. Granted, few look into this, but my own random samplings of the case histories of violent, mentally ill individuals more often than not implicate psycho-pharmacological medication as a primary factor. Given how even the most casual perusal of the onerous “side”-effects of anti-psychotic (neuroleptic) drugs makes clear, this is no surprise.
Is the severity of a violent act a useful measure of mental disturbance? How much “crazier” is an angry person discharging a firearm that our lax laws virtually hand to him, than a similar individual residing in a country that denies him access to lethal weaponry and opportunity to pull their triggers?
The mentally ill comprise a complex population in which the challenges of poverty, familial dysfunction, domestic abuse, social injustice, cognitive impairment, and racism overlap. The mentally ill are far more likely to be the victims of violence than its perpetrators. For being tone deaf to the issues, over-simplifying and exaggerating mental illness’ relation to violence Dr. Torrey is reviled by patient advocacy groups. He has also been called out for denying the connection between psychological trauma and mental disturbance. Because Dr. Torrey insists that the mentally ill are too dangerous not to be hospitalized, practitioners of conventional psychiatry devoted to outpatient treatment and deinstitutionalization disdain him as well.
“If only I had the brains!”
In 1989 Torrey founded the Stanley Medical Research Institute (SMRI). There, searching for signs of the viral connection Dr. Torrey insists causes schizophrenia, dozens of his researchers slice, dice and pore over the brains of deceased, mentally ill individuals. The largest brain bank in the world, SMRI did not always have the scruples to obtain permission from the newly deceased’s family prior to harvesting the brains of their late relative. Following its settlement with an aggrieved family, SMRI was compelled to desist from its ghoulish efforts to corner the market on brains. In doing so, the organization smugly asserted that, no matter, the Institute had by then already acquired sufficient cerebral tissue.
Dr. Torrey oversaw his sister, Rhoda’s, psychiatric hospitalization during long stretches when she languished in Marcy State Hospital and Mohawk Valley Psychiatric Hospital. While there, despite not receiving any further psychoanalytic treatment, her schizophrenia stubbornly resisted cure. Cheated out of the opportunity to harvest Rhoda’s brain following her death at the age of seventy in 2010 and deprived of the chance to extract and brandish its telltale virus, Dr. Torrey was doubtless left gnashing his teeth.
Dr. Torrey, who has written twenty-one books and two hundred papers, is lionized by the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), a group that, despite heavy funding from the pharmaceutical industry, promotes itself with a straight face as a “grass roots” organization.
NAMI annually holds a high-profile traumatic brain injury conference where the latest developments in radiology, diagnosis, prevention, coping and brain trauma’s relation to the Pandemic can be showcased. As for actual treatment for traumatic brain injury (TBI)? That is a separate matter. Year after year, little other than quiet seclusion in a dark room is on offer for those suffering TBI’s debilitating long-term effects.
Homeopathy on the other hand, features remedies that its practitioners routinely employ to eradicate brain trauma’s acute and lingering effects. The curative impact for TBI of homeopathic medicines such as Arnica, Natrum Sulphuricum andCicuta Virosa is an open secret. Full disclosure: no brains were harvested to determine these TBI remedies’ (or any other homeopathic medicines‘) benefits. When I informed members of a local NAMI chapter of this they responded excitedly, agreeing that what homeopathy had to offer is worth discussing. Their enthusiasm was not shared by the annual conference planners, however. They preferred that, as with someone suffering from a migraine headache, NAMI’s audience is best off remaining in the dark. The leadership consigned my application to present to the circular file.
Paging Nurse Ratched
Mayor Adams’ embrace of Torrey, and his concession that de-institutionalization for the mentally ill is a disaster suggests that a return to the bad old days of psychiatric cuckoo nests beckons. Though New York City has 60,000 people living in shelters, it is the media’s focus on the unfortunate, relatively few street and subway encounters that is frightening New Yorkers. Feeling empowered to authorize sweeps of homeless encampments Adams has deputized teams of clinicians and police officers to provide “outreach” to subway vagabonds. Ostensibly this is to offer services. The outreach’s actual intent, to move the emotionally disturbed somewhere out of sight brings to mind a supposedly bygone practice, putting the unwelcome into carts and riding them out of town, the euphemism for which is “passing on.”
Mayor Adams’s embrace of Dr. Torrey and his concession that the deinstitutionalization program for the mentally ill is a disaster both suggest that a return to the bad old days of psychiatric cuckoo nests is beckoning. New York City has 60,000 people living in shelters, yet it is the media’s focus on the unfortunate and relatively few street and subway encounters that has made New Yorkers feel unsafe. Feeling empowered to authorize sweeps of homeless encampments, Adams has deputized teams of clinicians and police officers to provide “outreach” to unkempt and disturbed looking people in the subways. Ostensibly, this is to offer services. The outreach’s actual intent, to move the emotionally disturbed somewhere out of sight, brings to mind a supposedly bygone practice, putting the unwelcome into carts and riding them out of town, the euphemism for which is “passing on.”
Especially when it’s involuntary, the process of being admitted to a hospital and remaining in a psych unit is traumatic. Already unstable patients must endure long waits in a chaotic emergency room environment. Upon admission, they must relinquish their clothes, phones, and other belongings. If disturbed by their sequestration, they are subdued with sedatives and/or physical restraints.
New York City has experienced a decrease in its number of psychiatric hospital beds over the years. Some 425 of the beds removed to make room for COVID-19 patients remain unavailable. A public health hospital in Harlem attributes increasing levels of patient violence to insufficient support staff. Mental health care staffing, patient capacity and quality of care are in desperate need of an upgrade.
The short and long-term goals are reasonable: stabilize people and then connect them with mental health care and support to meet such basic needs as housing. Since community programs have waiting lists, this is not always possible. As of November 2022, special outreach teams, known as assertive community treatment teams, had an 800-person waiting list. The Jewish Board, a nonprofit that operates outpatient mental health clinics across the city, reports that there is currently a 1,500-person waitlist for a therapist.
A recourse hiding in plain sight
Though funding additional social workers, therapists and housing for the oppressed will help, throwing money in the general direction of conventional psychiatry will only worsen matters, as it has always done in the past. Mayor Adams, Dr. Torrey and others are convinced that something other than this losing proposition does not exist. They are mistaken.
Whether in acute or long-term settings a viable recourse for the mentally ill is there for the taking. Relied upon by at least 300 million people the world over and a mainstay of care throughout Europe, South America, and all of India, the solution is hiding in plain sight. Despite relentless and baseless denigration by the pharmaceutical industry, powerful, safe, and cost-effective homeopathic treatment remains the answer.
A colleague in England, Francis Treuherz, maintains a growing library of over ten thousand homeopathy volumes. It’s doubtful they would have been written if homeopaths had nothing important to say. For example, some texts that a homeopathic practitioner working in a psychiatric emergency room might refer to include the following:
- Homeopathic Psychiatry – Understanding The Use And Meaning Of The Delusion Rubrics In Case Analysis by Liz Lalor
- Homeopathic Medicine for Mental Health by Trevor Smith
- Psychiatry Remedies Paperback –1890, by Jean-Pierre Gallavardin
Regarding inpatient care, for at least half a century, compassionate, safe, and effective homeopathic psychiatric hospitals proliferated in America. The care was provided in utopian, often self-sustaining and popular settings, asylums of the post-Civil War and early nineteenth century eras. Our collective ignorance of their history of success stems from the psycho-pharmaceutical industry’s fear of disruption of its economic hegemony. To protect the bottom line, it has endeavored to and succeeded in eradicating almost all mention of it. It has filled the resulting vacuum with a fictitious narrative. The true story can be found in my book, Sane Asylums, The Success of Homeopathy Before Psychiatry Lost Its Mind.
For more about the psycho-pharmaceutical industry’s shenanigans see:
- Psycho-Pharm Humbug Lures PT Barnum Back from the Dead
- When History has been Hijacked, the Narrative Must Be Seized or Else Choice is Forfeited
- New York City information pertaining to Mayor Adams’ new policy is drawn from from this link:
Tune into Jerry’s Magickal Solutions interview on his book, Sane Asylums, with host Leilani at 7:00pm on January 15, 2023.