Father of American psychiatry
by Maxine
Today, July 22 is the birthday of Karl Menninger, psychiatrist and founder of the Menninger Clinic. Menninger was born in 1893 in Topeka, Kansas. His views on psychiatry were influenced by Freud but expanded to include family and environment as factors leading to mental illness. His clinic started as a thirteen bed facility in a converted farmhouse and grew to a campus, currently in Houston, of thirty buildings and over nine hundred staff. Menninger believed that a caring, therapeutic family setting and meaningful work went a long way in healing troubled people. Later in his life, he devoted himself more to social causes such as prison reform, child abuse, the rights of Native Americans and the environment.
Blog Post