Psychiatrist, born in Topeka, Kansas, USA. After receiving his medical degree from Harvard Medical School (1917), he worked for two years at the Boston Psychopathic Hospital. In 1919 he returned to Topeka and co-founded the Menninger Diagnostic Clinic (1920) with his father, Charles Frederick Menninger, who had become convinced of the advantages of group medical practice after visiting the Mayo Clinic (1908). At first practising conventional medicine, Karl's training and interest led him to treat emotional problems. When his brother William received his medical degree, the two co-founded the Menninger Sanitarium and Psychopathic Hospital (1925). The Menningers pioneered intensive milieu therapy, the use of the hospital's social environment as a key part of the therapeutic process. In his best-selling book, The Human Mind (1930), Karl put forward the position that the difference between normality and mental illness was only one of degree. In other books, such as Man Against Himself (1938) and The Crime of Punishment (1968), he argued for a humane approach to most of people's failings. He would have a major impact on the reform of Kansas's and other state's mental health programmes, and served as an adviser to many federal agencies. Although not a strict Freudian, he borrowed some of Freud's ideas for his own eclectic approach to mental illness. In 1931, the Menninger Sanitarium became the first institution licensed to train psychiatric nurses, and in 1933 opened a psychiatric residency programme for physicians. In 1941 the family founded the Menninger Foundation, which Karl headed until his death.
For the mathematician, see Karl Menninger (mathematics).Karl Augustus Menninger (July 22, 1893 - July 18, 1990) was an American psychiatrist and a member of the famous Menninger family of psychiatrists who founded the Menninger Foundation and the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas.
Karl Menninger was born in Topeka, Kansas. Together with his father, Charles Frederick Menninger, he founded the Menninger Clinic. The Menninger Foundation was established in 1941 and quickly became a U.S. psychiatric and psychoanalytic center.
During his career, Menninger wrote a number of influential books. In his first book, The Human Mind, Menninger argued that psychiatry was a science; In The Crime of Punishment, Menninger argued that crime was preventable through psychiatric treatment;
Menninger's "mea culpa" letter To Thomas Szasz
On October 6, 1988, less than two years before his death, Karl Menninger wrote an historic letter to Thomas Szasz, the controversial libertarian psychiatrist and author of The Myth of Mental Illness and many other books, repudiating his officially expressed views on psychiatry. After reminiscing over his many years of observations of the treatment of psychiatric patients, Menninger expressed his regret that he did not come over to Szasz's positions on psychiatry. The tone and style of Menninger's letter suggests he had been much closer to Szasz on the issues than one might have suspected from reading Szasz's criticisms of Menninger. In Menninger's letter he puts the terms diagnosis, patients and treatment in quotes, suggesting that he had agreed with Szasz's arguments that psychiatric diagnosis is a medical fraud, psychiatric patients are prisoners and psychiatric treatments are tortures. Menninger's letter to Szasz and Szasz's reply has since been released into the public domain and can be read in there entirety at Szasz.com.
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