The psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey is 85 years old and has Parkinson’s disease, the tremors at times so strong that his hand beats like a drum on the table.
Still, every morning when he reads the newspapers, he looks for accounts of violent behavior by people with severe mental illness, to add to an archive he has maintained since the 1980s.
His records include reports of people who, in the grip of psychosis, assaulted political figures or pushed strangers into the path of subway trains; parents who, while delusional, killed their children by smothering, drowning or beating them; adult children who, while off medication, killed their parents with swords, axes or hammers.
Dr. Torrey, who has done pioneering research into the biological basis of schizophrenia, has used these stories in service of an argument: that it was a mistake for the United States to shut down its public psychiatric hospitals without adequate follow-up care. And that to remedy this, the government should create systems to compel seriously mentally ill people in the community to get treatment.