William Walter Menninger (born October 23, 1931), known by his peers as "Dr. Walt", is an American psychiatrist in the third generation of the Menninger family, which has run the Menninger Foundation since 1925. He served as dean of the Karl Menninger School of Psychiatry and Mental Health Science and he was the CEO of the Menninger Clinic from the 1993 to 2001. During his tenure as CEO, the clinic began negotiations to move from Topeka, Kansas, to Houston, Texas, where it is affiliated with Baylor College of Medicine.
Menninger has special interests in psychoanalysis and forensic psychiatry. He has served on several boards or committees related to prisons, police work and violence prevention. His research with Peace Corps volunteers resulted in his development of the Menninger morale curve, a schematic used to predict responses among people who are in new environments. Menninger wrote a nationally syndicated newspaper column for several years; he has served as editor of Psychiatry Digest and the Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic.
Early life and education
William Walter Menninger was born in 1931 in Topeka, Kansas, to William C. Menninger and the former Catherine Wright.[1] His father was a doctor and psychiatrist in practice with his brother Karl and father C. F. Menninger. They had founded the Menninger Clinic in 1925.
Early in his career, Menninger became affiliated with Topeka State Hospital. In the early 1970s, he spoke out about budget cuts that affected the training and hiring of personnel at the hospital. By that time, Menninger was also seeing psychiatric patients at his family's Menninger Foundation.[4] By the mid-1970s, Menninger had taken leave from the foundation to focus on administration of the state hospital.[5]
Menninger conducted research on the morale of volunteers in the Peace Corps and in Volunteers in Service to America. As a result, he created the Menninger morale curve, which reflects the responses that can be expected when a person faces life changes. Menninger created a curve for positive life changes and one for negative changes. The curves identify four crisis points that a person must surmount when entering a new environment.[6]
Menninger's grandfather, C. F. Menninger, father, William C. Menninger, and uncle, Karl Menninger, established The Menninger Foundation in 1925 in Topeka, Kansas.[7] With years of managing the large state hospital, in 1993 Walt succeeded his older brother, Roy W. Menninger, as the leader of the foundation.[8] Menninger named Efrain Bleiberg as the president of the organization. He realized that he was probably the last family member to lead the organization; his plan included grooming Bleiberg for the CEO position when he decided to step down.[9]
Retiring from the Menninger Foundation in 2001, Menninger became the chairman of Menninger Trustees. The Menninger Clinic moved from Topeka to Houston in 2003, becoming affiliated with Baylor College of Medicine. While his older brother Roy was bothered by the move, Walt Menninger backed the change in location. Consultants had recommended that the clinic be moved to an urban area near a medical school and an airport.[10] In 2000, Walt Menninger had said that the clinic would be out of business in a few years unless it moved.[11] In the summer of 2001, negotiations between Menninger and Baylor College of Medicine were briefly called off, but the two institutions were able to work out an affiliation before the move.[12]
Relationships between the Menninger brothers and with other family members have sometimes been contentious, especially over moving the clinic after decades in Topeka, determining where to locate its archives, and the leadership of the organization in general. Psychiatrist William Simpson has described the battles at the Menninger Clinic, saying, "First Dr. Roy pushed Dr. Walt aside, and he went into exile at the state mental hospital. Then Dr. Walt [came back and] pushed Dr. Roy aside."[13]
Other affiliations and awards
Menninger was the editor of Psychiatry Digest for several years in the 1970s.[14] He authored close to 1,000 articles in a national newspaper column known as In-Sights in the 1970s and 1980s.[1] He served as editor of the Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic for more than ten years until 2014.[15]
He has specific interests in psychoanalysis, forensic psychiatry and administrative psychiatry.[2] He was called as an expert witness at the competency hearing of Sara Jane Moore.[16]
Menninger is president of the Tower Mental Health Foundation, which assists mental health organizations in Kansas.[22]
Personal
Menninger met his wife Connie while attending Stanford University. They had six children together: Fritz, John, Eliza, Marian, Will, and David.[23] Daughter Eliza Menninger became a psychiatrist affiliated with Harvard Medical School.[24] Connie Menninger died in 2008.[1]
Menninger served as a consultant for the 2013 film adaptation of The Great Gatsby, which begins and ends in a sanatorium, based on the Menninger Clinic. As a nod to Menninger, the psychiatrist in the movie is named Walter Perkins.[28]
Selected publications
Menninger, W. W. (1976). Happiness Without Sex: And Other Things Too Good to Miss. Sheed Andrews and McMeel.
Menninger, W. W. (ed.) (1987). Military Psychiatry: Learning from Experience. Menninger Foundation.
Menninger, W. W. (ed.) (1996). Coping with Anxiety: Integrated Approaches to Treatment. J. Aronson.
The American Psychiatric Association (APA) is the main professional organization of psychiatrists and trainee psychiatrists in the United States, and the largest psychiatric organization in the world. It has more than 38,000 members who are involved in psychiatric practice, research, and academia representing a diverse population of patients in more than 100 countries. The association publishes various journals and pamphlets, as well as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). The DSM codifies psychiatric conditions and is used mostly in the United States as a guide for diagnosing mental disorders.
Karl Augustus Menninger was an American psychiatrist and a member of the Menninger family of psychiatrists who founded the Menninger Foundation and the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas.
William Claire Menninger was a co-founder with his brother Karl and his father of The Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kansas, an internationally known center for treatment of behavioral disorders.
The Menninger Foundation was founded in 1919 by the Menninger family in Topeka, Kansas. The Menninger Foundation, known locally as Menninger's, consists of a clinic, a sanatorium, and a school of psychiatry, all of which bear the Menninger name. Menninger's consisted of a campus at 5800 S.W. 6th Avenue in Topeka, Kansas which included a pool as well as the other aforementioned buildings. In 2003, the Menninger Clinic moved to Houston. The foundation was started in 1919 by Dr. Charles F. Menninger and his sons, Drs. Karl and William Menninger. It represented the first group psychiatry practice. "We had a vision," Dr. C. F. Menninger said, "of a better kind of medicine and a better kind of world."
Karl Kalman Targownik was a psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor.
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Roy Wright Menninger was an American medical doctor and psychiatrist. He served as president and CEO of the Menninger Foundation from 1967 to 1993.
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Nathan W. Ackerman was a Russian-born American psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and one of the most important pioneers of the field of family therapy. He also was an expert in marriage counselling.
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Glen Owens Gabbard is an American psychiatrist known for authoring professional teaching texts for the field. He is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, and is also training and supervising analyst at the Center for Psychoanalytic Studies in Houston.
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Menninger is a surname. Notable people with the surname or its variant Meningerg include:
Charles Frederick Menninger was a physician who co-founded the Menninger Foundation with his sons, Karl and William.
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The Greater Kansas City and Topeka Psychoanalytic Center and Institute, also known as the Greater Kansas City Psychoanalytic Center and Institute (GKCPI), is a psychoanalytic center in Kansas City, Missouri, that comprises several interrelated organizations. Currently these are the Kansas City Psychoanalytic Foundation, the Greater Kansas City and Topeka Psychoanalytic Center (GKCTPC), and the Greater Kansas City Psychoanalytic Institute (GKCPI), also known as the Foundation, the center, and the institute. In the early 2000s, the Greater Kansas City Psychoanalytic Institute merged with the older Topeka Psychoanalytic Society.
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