E. Fuller Torrey: The Tragic Odyssey of the Homeless Mentally Ill

Many mental health professionals know very little about the origins of today's public mental illness disaster. It's high time we remedy that.

Cover art for the 2025 open access edition of Dr. E. Fuller Torrey’s Nowhere to Go: The Tragic Odyssey of the Homeless Mentally Ill published by Springer Nature and available here free of charge.

By E. Fuller Torrey

Nowhere to Go: The Tragic Odyssey of the Homeless Mentally Ill was first published in 1988 by Harper and Row. At that time, severely mentally ill individuals, most of whom had schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, were just becoming visible as problems among the homeless population and among those in America’s jails and prisons. The book detailed the origins of these problems—the emptying of the state mental hospitals without providing aftercare for the discharged patients and the related failure of the Community Mental Health Centers program, despite the investment of three billion federal dollars in setting up the centers. The book was partly based on unpublished data from the National Institute of Mental Health, where I had worked in the 1970s. In the preface to the first e…