Difference between revisions of "Portal:Featured Article Of The Week"

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|Title= Menniger Clinic
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|Title= Mendota Mental Health Institute
|Image= KSmenningermainbldg.png
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|Image= Mendota03.jpg
 
|Width= 150px
 
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|Body= The Menninger Foundation of Topeka, Kansas, began as an outpatient clinic in the 1920s serving the local Shawnee County populace for a variety of ills. Karl Menninger began persuading his father Charles Frederick, or C.F., to focus the clinic's area of expertise on psychiatric and mental health cases. The Menningers opened the first clinic in 1919. In 1925 they purchased a farmhouse on the outskirts of town to for a sanitarium to provide long-term in-patient care. William Claire Menninger, Karl's youngest brother, joined Karl and their father in this practice that same year, fulfilling C.F.’s dream of a group practice with his sons.
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|Body= Mendota opened on July 14, 1860 when it admitted a patient who had been brought all the way from Oconto County...a long trip by horse and wagon. Even though the hospital was not yet ready to open, that Saturday it was decided that, because of the distance the patient had been brought, he should be received. Thus began Mendota's ready response to the needs of patients and communities, which has been its tradition.
  
The sanitarium began expanding almost immediately. The Menninger family opened other operations, including Southard School for children, one of the first such institutions for children with mental health disabilities. The family also began training psychiatric professionals and performing research, as well as publishing in the Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic. During the 1930s Will and other Menninger staff formulated and refined their milieu therapy, a treatment program focusing on the whole individual and every staff member’s interaction with a patient.
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Mendota has gone through many changes since then, some of them dramatized in the changes in its name. It opened as an "Asylum", appropriate in an era when little could be done for the mentally ill except to house and care for them...i.e. to give them asylum...when their families and communities could no longer cope with their needs.
  
Karl became a popularly respected and well-known figure in psychiatry after the publication of his first book in 1930 and writing a regular advice column in the Ladies’ Home Journal. Will, like many other Menninger staff, joined the armed forces during World War II; by the end of the war he was a brigadier general and extremely influential in the treatment and care of soldiers with psychiatric problems.  [[Menniger Clinic|Click here for more...]]
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In a later era, when patients were recognized as having an illness...mental illness...the name was changed to Mendota State Hospital, reflecting its responsibility for providing treatment.
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In more recent times, with the discovery of psychiatric medications and with new approaches (some of which resulted from research at Mendota itself) it became possible for the mentally ill to be treated in community hospitals and clinics. But there remained a need for a place for those who required more specialized treatment than most community hospitals and clinics could provide, and where the tradition of research, education, and consultation that Mendota had already established could continue. Mendota was then changed to its present name of Mendota Mental Health Institute.  [[Mendota Mental Health Institute|Click here for more...]]
 
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Revision as of 04:45, 2 August 2020

Featured Article Of The Week

Mendota Mental Health Institute


Mendota03.jpg

Mendota opened on July 14, 1860 when it admitted a patient who had been brought all the way from Oconto County...a long trip by horse and wagon. Even though the hospital was not yet ready to open, that Saturday it was decided that, because of the distance the patient had been brought, he should be received. Thus began Mendota's ready response to the needs of patients and communities, which has been its tradition.

Mendota has gone through many changes since then, some of them dramatized in the changes in its name. It opened as an "Asylum", appropriate in an era when little could be done for the mentally ill except to house and care for them...i.e. to give them asylum...when their families and communities could no longer cope with their needs.

In a later era, when patients were recognized as having an illness...mental illness...the name was changed to Mendota State Hospital, reflecting its responsibility for providing treatment.

In more recent times, with the discovery of psychiatric medications and with new approaches (some of which resulted from research at Mendota itself) it became possible for the mentally ill to be treated in community hospitals and clinics. But there remained a need for a place for those who required more specialized treatment than most community hospitals and clinics could provide, and where the tradition of research, education, and consultation that Mendota had already established could continue. Mendota was then changed to its present name of Mendota Mental Health Institute. Click here for more...