DJ Jaffe, a giant in the world of mental-illness policy, died over the weekend.  

Others who knew DJ have written of his kindness and integrity. I echo their assessments of his character. I would like here to salute DJ the advocate—a teller of truths that many powerful people did not want to hear.

Jaffe’s life of advocacy began in the 1980s, when he and his wife took custody of his schizophrenic sister-in-law, who was turned away from various community programs in the twilight of deinstitutionalization. She eventually fell back into her psychosis. Outraged, Jaffe left his job as a marketing executive and dedicated his life to those like his sister-in-law who were ill-served by the existing treatment regime. He joined the National Alliance on Mental Illness, later became a board member of the Treatment Advocacy Center, and eventually founded the website Mental Illness Policy Org, a compendium of data and analysis to guide media and policymakers as they navigate the world of mental-illness policy.

Jaffe’s book Insane Consequences chronicled the failures of the mental-health industry in sordid detail. He spoke of professional psychiatry’s abdication of the seriously mentally ill in the middle of the 20th century. Doctors who once treated psychoses behind asylum walls began treating the ills of the body politic, seeking to create a “mentally healthy” society that could “prevent” mental illnesses before they began. Even as the promises of “prevention” proved illusory in the decades that followed President Kennedy’s 1963 Community Mental Health Act, beds were closed, services were cut, and inpatient commitment was made almost impossible. The most seriously mentally ill were left to rot in prisons and on street corners.

Jaffe told this story with passion and conviction. He dedicated his life to those least likely to have shared in the paradisiacal promises of the “community mental health” movement of the 20th century.

His advocacy focused on those who end up homeless, incarcerated, or deteriorating to the point of violence. “One hundred percent of adults can have their mental health improved,” he was fond of saying. “But serious mental illnesses are rare.” Jaffe estimated that such illnesses—defined by the National Institute of Mental Health as a “mental, behavioral, or emotional disorder resulting in serious functional impairment, which substantially interferes with or limits one or more major life activities”—affect about four percent of the U.S. population. He often found himself sparring with the government agencies, nonprofits, and advocacy shops charged with assisting the mentally ill, which tend to focus on the “worried well”—the anxious test-takers, the bickering spouses, the overworked executives and bullied teens. Those groups championed “mental health” and the pursuit of “wellness” at the expense of treating psychosis and other more serious conditions. “I am not a mental-health advocate,” Jaffe once informed a crowd of mental-health enthusiasts, “I am an advocate for the seriously mentally ill.” 

A self-described “liberal Democrat”—a persuasion he liked to reiterate when praising the Trump administration’s posture on mental illness—Jaffe understood that the American mental-health system was not failing primarily for want of funds, but for its neglect of the most serious cases. Dollars once devoted to hospital beds and housing were “now spent on pursuing vague social goals that have been arbitrarily wrapped into the mental health narrative: improving grades, ending poverty, cutting divorce rates, helping individuals gain comfort with their gender identity, decreasing rates of bullying, and increasing employment.”

Meanwhile, jails and homeless shelters had become veritable recreations of Victorian Bedlam. Jaffe was one of the few sounding the alarm, and one of even fewer doing anything about it.

Many who work in and around mental-health policy are unwilling to criticize the enterprise. It is much easier to nod along in supine agreement as the multibillion-dollar industry churns out yet another conference on “wellness,” or unveils a new “anti-stigma” campaign. Jaffe was never one to go along to get along. He said what he thought was true. A lot of people hated him for it. Some called him a “perpetual bomb thrower.” Jaffe was one of the few people in modern life who could claim—with any sort credibility—to be speaking truth to power.

The seriously mentally ill lost one of their great champions this weekend. He will be sorely missed.

John Hirschauer is a journalist and a former William F. Buckley Jr. Fellow in Political Journalism at National Review.