Bird Brains - questionable research priorities at National Institute of Mental Health - Statistical Data Included

Washington Monthly, May, 2001 by E. Fuller Torrey

By the late 1960s, NIMH was involved in activities such as city planning. Dr. Leonard Duhl, a high-ranking NIMH official, claimed in 1968 that the role of mental health professionals should be as a "change agent in society," with the goal of helping "construct a social system that produces mentally healthy individuals." By the 1970s, NIMH-funded Community Mental Health Centers (CMHCs) were involved in many community projects. In Los Angeles, for example, a CMHC organized parents to get a traffic light installed near a school. In Philadelphia, a CMHC board included "resolv[ing] the underlying causes of mental health problems such as unequal distribution of opportunity, income, and benefits of technical progress" as part of its mission statement. And in Chicago, a CMHC board hired Saul Alinsky, a well-known social activist, to advise them on how to promote mental health.

These actions were applauded by NIMH as being part of its grand vision. Today schizophrenia, tomorrow the world! In retrospect the vision was more grandiose than grand and has continued to be so to the present. It is this grandiosity that explains why, even as the research world has moved to molecular neuroscience, NIMH continues to fund research projects such as "Sentence Processing in Japanese and English" ($68,208), "Peer Rejection of Girls" ($505,862), and "Adolescent Romantic Relationships and Their Development" ($200,693).

Out On The Streets

During the 1970s and 1980s, as CMHCs helped with city planning and traffic lights, the state psychiatric hospitals were being emptied in an attempt to deinstitutionalize, or move the mentally ill into less restrictive settings in the community.

In 1955, there were over 559,000 severely mentally ill individuals in these hospitals; today there are less than 60,000. Based on the nation's population increase between 1955 and 2000, if there were the same number of patients per capita in those hospitals today as there was in 1955, there would be over 946,000 patients. That there are fewer than 60,000 means that almost 900,000 individuals are living in the community today who would have been hospitalized a half-century ago.

Where are these people? Half of them are living with their families or on their own and doing reasonably well. The other half, however, are not. Approximately 150,000 of them are living on the streets or in shelters, where they make up one-third of the homeless population. More than 200,000 of them are in jails or prisons, according to Department of Justice studies, often incarcerated for crimes committed because of their severe psychiatric illnesses. Another group died prematurely because of illness-related accidents or suicides. Still others have been moved to nursing homes.

Although NIMH vehemently denies it, there is a direct connection between its failure to focus resources on severe psychiatric disorders and the failure of deinstitutionalization. The sad fate of homeless mentally ill individuals, 28 percent of whom utilize garbage cans for some of their food supply, or of incarcerated mentally ill individuals, is inextricably bound to NIMH's failure to do research on the causes of, and to develop better treatments for, these diseases. The continuing failure of NIMH to do the job for which it was originally created is, in fact, one of the greatest, although least known, scandals in contemporary American society.