Schizophrenia Called Neglected Disease

Services and research money for schizophrenia, which afflicts 1.6 million Americans, should be dramatically increased to give the illness the same attention received by other major diseases such as cancer and muscular dystrophy, a Senate panel was told Thursday.

“Schizophrenia is in fact the most neglected disease in the United States,” said Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, a clinical and research psychiatrist in Bethesda, Md.

For each schizophrenia patient, an average of only $17 in federal funds is spent on research, while $300 is spent on each cancer victim and $1,000 on each muscular dystrophy patient, Torrey said.

Points to Lower Costs

“We have been very foolish in spending so little on research on this disease,” Torrey said in testimony before the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on labor, health and human services and education. “Even small advances in treatment would result in savings of literally billions of dollars,” he said, because caring for the patients is so expensive. Treatment costs have been estimated to be at least $20 billion a year.

Torrey urged that the current $21-million budget for schizophrenia research at the National Institute of Mental Health be vastly increased, reaching $160 million in fiscal 1989. The institute’s total research budget, covering a wide range of projects, is $235.4 million for fiscal 1987, which began Oct. 1.

Schizophrenia, whose cause is unknown, is a major mental disorder characterized by a distortion of reality, along with delusions, hallucinations and often bizarre behavior. Basic intellectual functions often remain intact.

Affliction of Homeless

Increasingly, schizophrenia is recognized as an affliction of the nation’s homeless, many of whom have been released from state mental institutions. Torrey said that 358,000 such people were “deinstitutionalized” between 1965 and 1980.

Torrey also called for returning the institute to the umbrella of the National Institutes of Health as a way of consolidating its research.

Now, he said, “inertia in the institute is absolutely overwhelming.” The institute has been under the Alcohol, Drug Abuse and Mental Health Administration since 1968.

Dr. Shervert H. Frazier, director of the institute, submitted a chart to the subcommittee, showing that 58% of the 1.6 million schizophrenics in the nation are receiving no known treatment. He suggested that a stigma attached to the disease has prevented widespread financial support for research.

Wants Different Image

Many witnesses, several of whom have relatives afflicted with the illness, gave poignant testimony about the disease and urged that television and movie producers refrain from routinely portraying schizophrenics as violent.

Actress Trish Van Devere said that her younger brother, a promising photographer with a droll wit, was struck by schizophrenia in 1970.

Since then, she said, she has seen firsthand how the disease does its work: “It steals. It murders. It leaves bereft. It takes away hope, promise and joy. It leaves despair, emptiness and desolate recall of what might have been. There is nothing more cruel.”

‘Hushed Tones’

Van Devere, board member of Pathways, a Greenwich, Conn., organization that assists schizophrenics, said that 1 in every 100 Americans will be diagnosed as having the disease, “yet it is spoken in hushed tones--if at all.”

Arguing on behalf of her brother and others like him, she said: “My brother did not do this to himself. He did not shoot heroin into his veins. He did not sniff cocaine. He is as innocent as an elderly person who falls prey to Alzheimer’s disease.”

Sen. Lowell P. Weicker Jr. (R-Conn.), subcommittee chairman, decried the lack of public concern over schizophrenia and vowed to make a “special effort” during the 100th Congress to appropriate more money for schizophrenia care and research.