Question and Answer
Marissa asks, in response to the below post, if I support the Treatment Advocacy Center’s stances. To be frank, TAC creeps me out — E. Fuller Torrey, in particular. They’re strident and dogmatic and stigmatizing in media appearances.
I think E. Fuller Torrey does the organization a disservice by being such a lunatic. Some of the change TAC advocates would be helpful, and I’m guessing there are people at TAC — like former executive director Mary Zdanowicz, who has two brothers with schizophrenia — who mean well and want to make positive change. But too often, people at TAC act like asshats, as Philip Dawdy says, hilariously. And they refuse to grapple with the implications of their media saturation.
I’ve never heard TAC answer the tough questions their stance raises. They seem content to skate around complexity, and there’s nothing I hate more than that.
Does that help, Marissa?
liz | 11:12 AM | Uncategorized
Mary Z. had a brother and a sister living with mental illness, not 2 brothers. I don’t think she means ill. I do think she did a lot of harm in her tenure and that TAC will continue to do harm by making people more afraid of people with psychiatric labels . I do not think Torrey is a lunatic, I think he is mean and doesn’t care how he affects others. Mary Z. was/is not mean and does care but allowed herself to be convinced that promoting fear of people with mental illness was a moral tactic to get the ends she desired. I am not aware of anything that TAC promotes that is a good idea but maybe I’ve missed something. There was a time many years ago when they were asking about quality of psychiatric care, but that seems to have disappeared from the agenda.
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