E. Fuller Torrey > Quotes

“Schizophrenia is a cruel disease. The lives of those affected are often chronicles of constricted experiences, muted emotions, missed opportunities, unfulfilled expectations. It leads to a twilight existence, a twentieth century underground man. The fate of these patients has been worsened by our propensity to misunderstand, our failure to provide adequate treatment and rehabilitation, our meager research efforts. A disease which should be found, in the phrase of T.S. Eliot, in the "frigid purgatorial fires" has become through our ignorance and neglect a living hell.”
― E. Fuller Torrey, Surviving Schizophrenia: A Manual for Families, Patients, And Providers

“Your daughter has schizophrenia," I told the woman.
"Oh, my God, anything but that," she replied. "Why couldn't she have leukemia or some other disease instead?"
"But if she had leukemia she might die," I pointed out. "Schizophrenia is a much more treatable disease."
The woman looked sadly at me, then down at the floor. She spoke softly. "I would still prefer that my daughter had leukemia.”
― E. Fuller Torrey, Surviving Schizophrenia: A Manual for Families, Patients, And Providers

“How could so many well-meaning professionals have been so wrong and been complicit in creating such a disaster? This book attempts to answer that question.”
― E. Fuller Torrey, American Psychosis: How the Federal Government Destroyed the Mental Illness Treatment System

“Great empires require great gods and great religions.”
― E. Fuller Torrey, Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods: Early Humans and the Origins of Religion

“Prior to about 40,000 years ago, hominins had been observing other hominins die for more than six million years. They were intimately acquainted with death as something that happened to others. They observed people die within their living group - children from disease, women from childbirth, men from hunting accidents, and older adults from starvation. They also occasionally encountered deceased hominins as they foraged for food or followed herds of deer. Unlike today, when the biological realities of death are relegated to the offices of medical examiners and morticians, early hominins saw corpses in all stages of decomposition, since even the occasional burial of bodies was apparently not practiced until the last 100,000 years.”
― E. Fuller Torrey, Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods: Early Humans and the Origins of Religion

“To have been accompanied on life's journey by the symbolic and monumental props of the gods has been a continuing and reassuring source of solitude. Such props quiet the inner voices that whisper about the inevitable end of life's drama.”
― E. Fuller Torrey, Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods: Early Humans and the Origins of Religion

“[P]eople who have invested hundreds of thousands of hours and thousands of dollars in therapies arising from Freudian theory are not pleased to learn that the theory is devoid of any scientific foundation.”
― E. Fuller Torrey, Freudian Fraud: The Malignant Effect of Freud's Theory on American Thought and Culture

“Great empires require great religions.”
― E. Fuller Torrey, Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods: Early Humans and the Origins of Religion

“...a mature understanding of death appears to be one of the last milestones in the cognitive development and evolution of the human brain.”
― E. Fuller Torrey, Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods: Early Humans and the Origins of Religion

“In short, early Homo sapiens had adquired the cognitive ability to enter into a conversation with the gods, just as modern Homo sapiens does today.”
― E. Fuller Torrey, Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods: Early Humans and the Origins of Religion

“The Freudian paradigm is so intertwined with liberalism and humanism and America that to doubt the former is to implicitly denigrate the latter.”
― E. Fuller Torrey, Freudian Fraud: The Malignant Effect of Freud's Theory on American Thought and Culture

“The ability of humans to speak a modern language and the evolution of our ability to think about ourselves thinking about ourselves thus appear to parallel each other.”
― E. Fuller Torrey, Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods: Early Humans and the Origins of Religion

“The presence of gods has been enormously comforting as we have continued to dutifully cross the stage of life, going about or daily tasks, yet knowing that Pale Death was waiting in the wings.”
― E. Fuller Torrey, Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods: Early Humans and the Origins of Religion

“But wait - where did the gods come from 100,000 years ago? Early Homo Sapiens certainly had conversations with other early Homo Sapiens regarding what they thought of one another, and what they thought about a third early Homo Sapiens who had insulted them, and why they were no longer on speaking terms with the other person, ad finitum, just as happens today. But you cannot have such conversations about the gods or with the gods unless you have gods.”
― E. Fuller Torrey, Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods: Early Humans and the Origins of Religion