DJ Jaffe is Exec. Dir. of Mental Illness Policy Org, and an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Mental Illness Policy Org is a “Think-Tank” founded in 2011 to provide unbiased and easy-to-access information to the media and policy-makers about care and treatment of people with serious and persistent mental illness. The issues they face are different from those with mental ‘health’ issues and often get lost in the larger dialogue. Being honest about this population requires addressing difficult issues like violence and involuntary treatment, issues many organizations prefer to avoid.
DJ is a long-time advocate for improving care for people with serious mental illness. His advocacy focuses exclusively on important, difficult issues like the connection between violence and untreated serious mental illness, the need to reform involuntary treatment laws to make treatment easier, the need to preserve inpatient capacity, not guilty by reason of insanity, and other issues ignored by those who focus their efforts on relatively high-functioning individuals with mental “health” issues as opposed to serious mental illness.
His articles for the National Review can be found here.
