In 1988, Jonathan Stanley spent three days fleeing imagined government agents in New York City.
After he was found naked, perched on a crate in a deli, the 19-year-old was held in a psychiatric facility and diagnosed with bipolar disorder. With medication, he has gone on to a successful legal career and has been public about his diagnosis and an advocate for people with mental illness.
But that painful moment was a turning point for his parents, Ted and Vada Stanley — setting them on the path to become likely the largest philanthropic supporters of the long and arduous search for the causes of mental-health disorders.
In 2007, the Stanleys pledged $10 million to the Broad Institute, a genomics research center at Harvard and MIT, to study the genetic basis for mental illness.
Ted Stanley, an entrepreneur who co-founded the Danbury Mint, called back the day after he made that commitment with a better idea. He increased his donation to $100 million to create the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute, according to Eric Lander, the Broad Institute’s president.
“Ted and Vada Stanley had been making small gifts, and they were very concerned that the impact was small and the collective impact of all these small gifts wasn’t moving the needle,” says Lander. “It was their idea to give a large gift, to really advance psychiatric genetics.”
In 2014, the year after Vada died, Stanley eclipsed that donation with the largest gift to psychiatric research ever, according to the Broad Institute — $650 million for the Stanley Center. With that donation and their gifts to other institutions and causes, the Stanleys appeared on the Philanthropy 50 list eight times from 2005 to 2014. Ted Stanley died in 2016.
Genetic Analysis
Ted Stanley understood the importance of uncovering the biology underpinning mental illness, wrote Stephen Jones, executive director of the Stanley Family Foundation, in an email. Mental disorders are hard to study. Research doesn’t generally involve studying animals or observing cells in petri dishes like it does with many other illnesses. These complications, along with a historical lack of funding for mental-health research, has left people who have mental illnesses with few effective treatments.
“This required a transformative, focused, large-scale scientific effort,” Jones wrote.
The Broad Institute has received about $60 million to $70 million a year from the foundation Stanley set up to support it. Those funds pay for researchers directly and also help scientists around the world collaborate on projects by paying for computational analysis and other costs. The Broad Institute contributes its genetic-analysis capability — widely considered among the best in the world.
This genetic research can help scientists understand the underlying causes of mental illness and may ultimately lead to cures, says Jeffrey Borenstein, CEO of the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation, which funds brain research and is another Stanley beneficiary. “It’s a very worthwhile approach,” he says.
A Focus on People of Color
The Chronicle’s 20th annual ranking of America’s biggest donors was topped by Michael Bloomberg and followed by the hotel magnate Barron Hilton, then Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO, and his wife, Wendy. The top five on the list each gave more than $1 billion to charity last year.
The donation has already produced results. More than 800 scientists in 36 countries collaborated to collect the world’s largest database of genetic information on people with mental illness. So far, the genes of 180,000 people have been analyzed, including those with mental illness in Africa — an important effort since the vast majority of genetic samples come from white European and American populations.
The center has already found 250 genes that may be related to mental illness, including particular genes that could be linked to schizophrenia.
“We have a black box that we have pried open, and we see these 250 things and we’re beginning to understand what the wiring diagram is,” says Lander.
He says that research is in the early stages and treatments are not around the corner, but already he says the Stanley-funded effort has revealed clues to mental illness that scientists could never have found otherwise. “We have material advances now that we did not have five years ago, all funded by the Stanleys,” says Ken Duckworth, medical director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness.
Many Needs
Mental health has long been poorly funded by government and philanthropy. There is a lack of services, support, and treatments. Large numbers of people with mental-health needs end up in the criminal-justice system.
Lander is well aware of the vast needs in every facet of how mental illness is handled. Even though his organization benefited because Stanley decided to invest in this one area, he says that funding genetic research isn’t more or less important than funding services for those with mental-health needs — something that is also very important. “We shouldn’t be trading these things off against each other in any way,” he says.
It is hard to know what results the science will bring, says NAMI’s Duckworth. “You don’t know until you get there which was the best path,” he says. “But this was a very reasonable decision and was not a wasted effort.”
Wide-Ranging Benefits
The Stanleys’ gift has made a difference beyond the work it has directly funded. Lander says that with a new understanding of the mechanisms that may be behind some forms of mental illness, pharmaceutical companies are showing renewed interest.
And with a significant and steady source of funding, more young researchers are willing to specialize in the area, a change from years ago when funding was scarce, says Borenstein, of the brain-research foundation.
Stanley’s gift has also helped to erase some of the stigma attached to mental illness, and that has helped encourage others to donate, Borenstein says. “The fact that he was so public in this donation inspires others to be generous as well.”
Stanley’s decision to give such a large sum to this one line of research has opened up vast possibilities for understanding and perhaps one day treating these disorders. “It’s a great example of the power of philanthropy at its best,” says Lander.
