The Menninger Clinic history

In 1926 the Menningers opened the Southard School for mentally retarded children, and in a matter of years they were accepting children with all types of mental disorders.

His first major book, “The Human Mind,” published in 1930, was written for medical students, but unexpectedly became a bestseller.

Many of the hospitals catered to wealthy patients, ''persons of education and social refinement,'' as the journalist Dwight MacDonald noted in a 1935 article in Fortune magazine.

The foundation, formed In 1941 primarily as a fundraising organization, is the institutional umbrella for all of the clinic's activities.

By 1942 the Topeka Institute for Psychoanalysis was founded as part of the Menninger Clinic.

In February 1946, they founded the “The Northside Center for Child Development” in Harlem.

By the time C. F. died in 1953, he had firmly established the clinic's “no‐patientis‐untreatable “precept in the minds of hundreds of American psychiatrists.

Doctor Kenneth Clark believed "racist system inevitably destroys and damages human beings; it brutalizes and dehumanizes them, black and white alike." The Clarks also created Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited, or Haryou, in 1962.

In 1965, Karl moved to Chicago.

He was the first to become a tenured instructor in the City College system of New York and, in 1966, the first black elected to the New York State Board of Regents.

In 1974 the foundation established the Center for Applied Behavioral Sciences, which provided current scientific information on human behaviour and motivation to business, industry, and government.

There are now only 8 psychiatrists on staff, compared with 80 in the late 1980's.

''If any patient came in for only a week, it was considered to be an inappropriate treatment,'' said Doctor Steven S. Sharfstein, who took over the direction of Sheppard Pratt in 1981, and presided over its transformation into the Sheppard Pratt Health System.

''At Craig House in the hills above Beacon, N.Y., the 50 patients were transported in chauffeur-driven limousines, enjoyed their own golf course, and drank wine from the hospital's private vineyards,'' wrote Doctor Lawrence J. Friedman in a 1990 biography, ''Menninger: The Family and the Clinic.''

But Roy's younger brother, Doctor Walter Menninger, who succeeded him as president in 1993, strongly backed the move, after business consultants recommended partnering with an academic medical school, in an urban center, closer to an airport.

Descendents of the two brothers continued their involvement with the Menninger Foundation and Clinic, although many of the clinic’s operations were reduced in 2000.

In 2003 the clinic moved from Topeka to Houston, where it continued to provide a range of diagnostic and speciality inpatient programs for various age groups.