TAC Finally Talks Sense

The fine folks at the Treatment Advocacy Center put up a blog post pointing out that not only do their homies at NAMI National get a large percentage of their funding from pharma companies--as the Philly Inquirer recently drubbed them over--but so do NMHA and the Bazelon Center. TAC claims that it doesn't. Good for you guys. So who funds you? The same Stanley Foundation that funds your founder Fuller Torrey? Some other benefactor?

BTW, it is a bit opportunistic of TAC to point this out since Torrey is the founder of NAMI, and both NMHA and, especially, the Bazelon Center have been critical of TAC. And TAC and NAMI National are in bed on the outpatient commitment issue. But, as far as I know TAC's point is accurate.

Let me be opportunistic in return: TAC describes its operations as a "lean and mean approach [that] has resulted in many successes." It's no surprise that TAC can work inexpensively. That's easy to do when your advocacy is completely one-dimensional, you pray on headline-grabbing tragedies and angle your argument towards newspapers' editorial boards and state legislators. Editorial board folks generally stopped doing the kind of skeptical thinking that leads to nuanced writing well before they got to walk away from reporting or, in many cases, copy-editing jobs and took on "the important policy issues of the day." And legislators? They lost their bullshit detectors years before running for office. (It's why they ran for office.)

But TAC's got a point. Pharma money comes with conflicts. All the same, if TAC claims it doesn't take pharma money, then can they also assure us that their are no pharma employees among its individual contributors?