Records of the Menninger Foundation Education Department

Abstract: The bulk of the records from this sub-collection concern the Menninger School of Psychiatry and its development, administration, and curriculum. These documents provide a wealth of detail about the early history of the MSP and administration's early struggles to provide staff, teach residents, and have adequate funding and employees for the school. Series include materials from some of the training institutions with which Menninger was affiliated, particularly the Winter VA Hospital and the Topeka State Hospital; also available is information regarding the alumni association and the women's social club at the Veterans Administration Hospital, Winter Wives.

Information about certain training programs is more fully available than about others in these records, such as the short-lived, experimental Menninger Foundation School for Psychiatric Aides; the visiting professors and Sloan Professors programs; or the undergraduate work-study Antioch Program. Nonetheless, a great deal of broad information is available over the decades for the MSP.

Certain topics, such as curriculum development and administration of the MSP, will show up in multiple series across the school's records and the larger Education Department's records. Broader searches may therefore be necessary in order to find all records related to a particular topic.

Other materials found in these records are from the Division of Publications, the bulk of which concern the foundation's Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, published bi-monthly for several years and later quarterly. The sub-collection spans the entirety of educational opportunities at Menninger starting in 1931 until the MSP closed down in 2001, though the bulk of the materials date from 1946 to the 1970s. Some materials may be restricted, usually due to information about individual students' grades and observations about their work.

Administrative History: The Education Department of the Menninger corporation grew organically over the decades, becoming a distinct entity only in 1946 after the establishment of the Menninger Foundation. Many of the department's activities, such as training residents and publishing the Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, had already begun by then under certain of the Menninger institutions.

Menninger started training residents and other professional staff, including nurses, in psychiatry by the early 1930s, on a small scale, as was typical for the time. Educational programming offered through the Menninger Foundation truly blossomed in 1946, however, when the Menninger School of Psychiatry (MSP) opened.

Dr. Will Menninger joined the Army in 1942, eventually becoming a brigadier general and running the Neuropsychiatry Division of the Surgeon General's office. He saw the desperate need for psychiatrists to help soldiers cope with the war, and both he and his brother Dr. Karl knew that need would only increase when the war was over. Dr. Karl persuaded the Veterans Administration, taking over the Winter General Army Hospital in Topeka, to help him fund and administer the new Menninger School of Psychiatry, also known early on as the Institute of Psychological Medicine (IPM).

Training at the new school consisted of a combination of lectures, seminars and group discussions, demonstrations and labs, and supervised clinical work at a number of different, mostly Kansas, institutions with which Menninger was affiliated. These training hospitals included Menninger's own clinic and C.F. Menninger Memorial Hospital, the Winter Veterans Administration Hospital, the Topeka State Hospital, and others. Initially a predoctoral program, by the early 1950s the MSP refocused its curriculum for postdoctoral, intensive and advanced education.

Educational programs offered through the MSP expanded over the decades, starting with general training, clinical psychology, child psychiatry, social worker training, or religion and psychiatry specializations. Other focuses and specializations followed, such as research, community psychiatry, criminology and delinquency, psychiatric nursing and nursing aides, hospital administration, etc. The school changed its name in the 1980s to the Karl Menninger School of Psychiatry and Mental Health Sciences (KMSP&MHS).

The Education Department relocated to the West Campus soon after the Menninger Foundation purchased the land from the Security Benefit Association, in the early 1960s. The department and the MSP remained somewhat separate entities until the early 1970s, when Dr. Roy instituted a major reorganization in the department and in the MSP.

MSP closed its doors in 2001, the last graduates in May of that year. Psychiatric training involving Menninger is now conducted through Baylor Medical College in Houston, where Menninger moved to in 2003.

Menninger's earliest publication efforts began in 1936 with the production of the Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, a peer-reviewed journal. Initially a bi-monthly publication, this became quarterly and was a prime opportunity for Menninger's own staff and students to publish. The BMC continues to be published by the Menninger Clinic in Houston.

Publication of this journal came under the Division of Publications in 1946, inaugurated under the Department of Education when it was created. The Division of Publications was in charge of other publishing efforts by the Menninger Foundation, as well as serving faculty and staff with their outside publishing efforts by providing editorial assistance and serving as liaison between staff and publishers. Other duties of the division included registering all publications by all faculty and staff members each year and binding such works together regularly in the Bound Papers of the Menninger Clinic, as well as taking care of the professional library. The division's name changed slightly to Division of Scientific Publications sometime in the 1980s.