The ideology trend is particularly evident in ongoing campaigns to legally force psychiatric patients in the community to take medication. In the first part of this series, I underscored the lack of scientific evidence behind the claim that non-medicated patients are more violence prone than those who are medicated.

Last week, I concluded that any drug treatment of patients must be provided in the context of greatly enhanced community services. Psychiatry patients suffer from lack of appropriate support. Many have been dumped out of hospitals to basically fend for themselves. Efforts to pump them full of drugs is hardly the answer.

Belief not Science

In researching this highly complex medical territory, I found myself often wondering how seemingly well-intentioned people get off on the wrong track. I suspect it sometimes comes about when powerful personal beliefs may color the available scientific data.

Take a strong case in point -- the position of psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey, director of the Stanley Research Foundation, in Bethesda, Md. He has strongly supported legislation that allows courts to enforce the medication of patients in the community.

Presumably he has the interests of patients in mind when he argues that lack of compliance with drugs may harm them. Groups fighting legislation to enforce medication have targeted Torrey as someone who is trampling on freedom of choice and have portrayed him as a drug-company influenced peddler of potions.

I'm not going to get into the debate about whether he is a "drug peddler" -- at least, for now. I would rather focus some badly needed attention on a recent editorial co-authored by Torrey in the American Psychiatric Association journal, Psychiatric Services.

It's here that a more scientific argument for medication enforcement breaks down and becomes bare-naked propaganda.

Is Mental Illness Like Tuberculosis?

In this editorial, Torrey asks whether psychiatry can learn from tuberculosis treatment. His point essentially in this piece is that many people with TB have been forced to take medications in order to help them help themselves and to prevent spreading of disease.

He's driving at the fact here that psychiatric patients need to be persuaded strongly to help themselves as well. But Torrey is throwing more fuel on the fire of debate by indelicately mentioning an infectious disease in the same breath as one for which there is no such evidence.

Does he really believe that noncompliance issues are similar in TB and mental illness? Does he think that TB infection is somehow akin to a mental illness "infection?"

The intriguing fact is that Torrey does actually believe strongly that mental illness might indeed have a viral trigger. He has often speculated about this and is currently involved in research that is examining the possibility that certain genetic sequences in our cells (sometimes considered to be remnants of ancient infections) might be activated by a virus to cause damage to brain cells.

I want you to know that I've remarked on some of this preliminary research in my new book, The Virus Within. I did so because Torrey's scientific work with a research unit at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore is worthy of our consideration.

Too bad he leaves the confines of responsible science and walks across the bridge to an ill-conceived advocacy.

This entire issue of the enforced drugging of psychiatric patients deserves enormous media attention because it has gotten well out of hand.