Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic
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At his death in 1929, Payne Whitney bestowed the funds to build and endow the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic (PWC) on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. An eight story free-standing hospital, it was immediately affiliated with Cornell University's medical school (now Weill Cornell Medical College) and with the New York Hospital (now New York-Presbyterian Hospital), both of which are adjacent to PWC.
Payne Whitney was a large donor to the Hospital and Medical College, and it has been an issue of long speculation why he chose a psychiatric building to be his primary naming opportunity at New York-Cornell. Whatever the reason, Payne Whitney has been synonymous with the best of clinical psychiatric care for many decades. The poet Robert Lowell wrote of his hospitalization at Payne Whitney, Marilyn Monroe was hospitalized there prior to her suicide, and Mary McCarthy based her book, The Group, on her inpatient experience.
The building itself was torn down in the early 1990s to make way for an expansion of the New York-Presbyterian Hospital over the FDR Drive. Since that time, all clinical and research services at the two primary Cornell psychiatric campuses—in Manhattan and in White Plains, New York—have been named after Payne Whitney.
Payne Whitney Clinic is home to some of the most notable psychiatrists in the country, including Jack Barchas, Arnold Cooper, Robert Michels, Otto F. Kernberg, and Theodore Shapiro, and is the "voluntary faculty" home to such psychiatrists as Roy Shafer and Dan Stern.
There is some controversy surrounding this clinic. Many patients have reported being misdiagnosed and imprisoned unfairly.
