Nowhere to Go The Tragic Odyssey of the Homeless Mentally Ill

This open access book attempts to answer the question, “Why are so many severely mentally ill people homeless or incarcerated?”  Updated since it’s original 1988 release, this book tracks the history of this question in the United States. The answer begins in 1955, when the United States deinstitutionalized the 559,000 patients who were in state mental hospitals. Today, only 35,000 remain. In 1963, Congress funded President Kennedy’s proposed federally funded Community Mental Health Centers (CMHCs), whose main purpose was to provide care for the patients being released from the hospitals. However, most of the CMHCs never did so, but rather became counseling centers for individuals with less serious mental illnesses. The lack of psychiatric aftercare for severely mentally ill individuals resulted in more than 200,000 of them who are homeless and more than 250,000 others who are in jails and prisons. This story also includes little known details such as the role played by conscientious objectors who worked in the state hospitals during WWII; Rosemary Kennedy’s psychosis; the influence of the conservative John Birch society on Presidents Nixon and Reagan; and mental health myths incorrectly attributed to Reagan. Finally, the book discusses what needs to be done to improve the mental illness treatment system. This is an ideal guide for psychiatrists, psychologists, and members of the public who are concerned about homelessness.

Prologue 2025: A Century of Psychiatric Mistakes.- Dimensions of a Disaster.- The Making of the “Mental Health” Myth.- The “Conchies” and General Hershey Create NIMH.- Freud and Buddha Join the Joint Commission.- From the Suffering Sick to the Worried Well.- Psychiatrists Who Would Be Kings.- Signposts to a Grate Society.- Where Did All the Psychiatrists Go?.- The Politics of Perdition: 1968-1988.- Cicero’s Conclusion.- Epilogue 2025: How to Fix the Mental Illness Treatment System.

Dr. Torrey is a clinical and research psychiatrist specializing in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. He holds degrees from Princeton (BA), McGill (MD), and Stanford (MA in anthropology) universities and trained in psychiatry at the latter. During the 1970s, when many of the events described in this book were taking place, he worked at the National Institute of Mental Health. He is currently the Associate Director for Research at the Stanley Medical Research Institute and a Professor of Psychiatry at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. He has authored or co-authored 20 other books, including Out of the Shadows, The Insanity Offense, American Psychosis, Surviving Schizophrenia, and Criminalizing the Seriously Mentally Ill. The Roots of Treason, his biography of Ezra Pound, was nominated as one of the five best biographies of 1983 by the National Book Critics Circle.