Menninger Hailed for Bringing Hope
Dr. Karl A. Menninger was eulogized Saturday as the man who brought psychiatry out of the “snake pit” era and gave new hope to the mentally ill.
About 1,000 people, including Gov. Mike Hayden and Rep. Jim Slattery (D-Kan.), packed the First Presbyterian Church for services for the psychiatrist, who died Wednesday of abdominal cancer. He would have been 97 today.
“If anything can be said about the Menninger era in psychiatry, which spans the entire history of psychiatry, it is that it has ushered in a new day of hope for those who were otherwise sealed in prisons of darkness,” said the church’s pastor, the Rev. W. James Richards.
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