We are pleased to announce that "Nowhere to Go: The Tragic Odyssey of the Homeless Mentally Ill" by TAC's founder, Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, is now available with an updated prologue and epilogue via open access. The book is freely available to read and/or download via the link here or by clicking on the image below. [https://go.tac.org/e/976233/book-10-1007-978-3-031-84685-4/7jgyq/539552757/h/mZNGehUOxe9mg2goFKfrAh5OQWWRcal5cUMxXlG65iQ]
 

 
When it was originally published in 1988, the book was said to be the definitive account of why deinstitutionalization failed, why the community mental health center movement failed, and why there are so many severely mentally ill individuals among the homeless and incarcerated.  The Wall Street Journal called it “a remarkable book”. The San Francisco Examiner said it was “a historical hit piece on the horrors of deinstitutionalization.” Newsweek called it “one of the most scathing indictments yet of the deinstitutionalization effort.”  And, according to the Washington Post, “Nowhere is a portrait of the battered mental patient more vividly drawn than in Nowhere to Go”.
 
Today, 70 years after we started emptying the state mental hospitals, there are approximately 218,000 severely mentally ill individuals who are homeless, 108,000 in our local jails, and 156,000 in our state and federal prisons. Deinstitutionalization has been politically an equal opportunity disaster. The emptying of the hospitals took place over 35 years under four Republican and three Democratic administrations. Since then, three more Republican and three more Democratic administrations have failed to correct the mistakes. The last two chapters of the book tells them how to do so.​​​​​​

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