NEW YORK (AP) — Jon Stanley considers himself fortunate among bipolar disorder patients. He eventually responded to the right drug cocktail after self-described “full-brained mania” almost 40 years ago left him naked in a New York City deli, convinced electricity coursed through the floor.
Others face a longer road to medication. Severe mental health care like his was “more art than science,” the retired lawyer remembered being told back then. Doctors
would rotate through medicines to “see if anything stuck.” The experience inspired his late parents, Ted and Vada Stanley, to donate hundreds of millions of dollars toward research into treatments for bipolar and schizophrenia during their lifetimes.
Now, their philanthropic legacy continues with a renewed gift for a biomedical collaborative working to understand such diseases and identify therapies. The Stanley Family Foundation announced another $280 million for the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at Broad Institute earlier this month, bringing its total contributions to the Massachusetts-based nonprofit over $1 billion.
The dedication reflects both their belief in its unique team-based approach and Jon’s fidelity to his billionaire retailer father’s desired application of the wealth he amassed selling collectibles.
“He said he wanted his ‘Manhattan Project,’” Jon recalled. “And so, the only question was: who was gonna be Oppenheimer?”
The Broad Institute launched in 2004 to tackle disease research with the combined forces of faculty from MIT, Harvard and other scientists. It has attracted prominent philanthropists including founding donors Eli and Edythe Broad as well as former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife, Wendy.
The Stanleys' giving has gone almost exclusively to the Broad Institute — a staggering commitment to one recipient. This latest unanticipated gift funds another seven years of its work to determine how these illnesses develop. By using rapid advancements in DNA sequencing, the goal is to accelerate new interventions, according to the Broad Institute's Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research co-director Ben Neale.
“We’ve made major discoveries of genes that dramatically increase the risk of developing these illnesses," Neale said. “We know we only have a small fraction of what is out there to be discovered.”
Jon grew up along the Connecticut coast as father's consumer products company, MBI, grew more successful. The money, he said, “kept getting bigger.” But Jon's father informed him early on he'd give most of the fortune away.
A focused philanthropic outlet came when his son developed bipolar disorder at 19. Jon first experienced mania at a London educational program while attending Williams College. He harbored dreams of making millions by setting up student housing for Americans studying abroad. But he quickly spent all his money, flipping from mania to depression.
The mania worsened when he returned to his liberal arts school campus in Massachusetts. He freaked out his girlfriend on a New York City visit with comments about secret agents following him. After three days wandering Manhattan without any money, he wound up in a deli where his body hurt from imagined electric shocks he felt jumping onto him.
“So, I did the logical thing: I took my clothes off. And that’s how the cops found me," Jon said.
He stayed six weeks at a psychiatric hospital in 1987, occasionally spending time in the “rubber room.” Lithium, which he'd already been prescribed, didn't work alone. The addition of an anticonvulsant called Tegretol did the trick.
Neither drug was developed to treat bipolar. Nor did doctors have the genetic understandings of the disease they do now — such as its common risk factors with schizophrenia, an insight driven by the Broad Institute.
Jon's parents wanted to change that.
Still, Jon said, his dad didn't “just start writing checks everywhere.”
His parents first founded the Stanley Medical Research Institute. As Ted aged, however, Jon said he decided to give nearly everything to the Broad Institute. Ted had become frustrated with academic research models where professors string together grants, working separately on similar causes that fall within a funder's interests. He wanted to put all his eggs in one basket.
“We give all the money to Broad and they’re all looking at the one problem,” he said. "It’s much more like a wartime economy.”
His father devoted $825 million altogether. But the stock market, where he'd invested his philanthropic funds, performed better than expected. There was additional money to commit.
Jon, one of three Stanley Family Foundation trustees, held no reservations about Broad receiving even more. He considers it his obligation to do "what my dad would want if he was here.”
“He didn’t think he needed all that he made." Jon said. "But he was very interested in making more so he could give it away. So, who am I to overrule what he thought?”
Funding to understand and treat mental illness might appear robust. However, experts caution the combined support from the government, private industry and philanthropy pales in comparison to the burden caused by diseases such as bipolar disorder.
The federal government provided more than $2 billion annually for mental health between 2019-2024. But studies show schizophrenia alone costs the U.S. more than $300 billion a year — partially due to fragmented care systems that don't treat people proactively enough, according to Sylvie Raver, a senior director at the Milken Institute’s Science Philanthropy Accelerator for Research and Collaboration.
Raver said there's been a decline in support for serious mental illness at the National Institutes of Health. The existing funding, according to Raver, can be siloed and isn't necessarily targeted toward the needs of impacted families like the Stanleys.
“When you marry capacity, like what the family has, and understanding and personal resonance with the topic, like they have as well, philanthropy is really primed to do exciting things," said Raver, who leads brain disease and mental health portfolios.
Pharmaceutical companies, another research funder, are bound by obligations to turn profits for shareholders and bring products to market. Neale, the Broad Institute member, said private industry's difficulty developing drugs chilled their enthusiasm in this area.
These are, he acknowledged, “some of the most difficult problems in all of medicine.”
“We don't even understand where the fundamental pathology is, the thing that's giving rise to the illness,” he said.
Neale hopes nonprofit researchers catalyze the rest of the field. His goal this next decade is to jumpstart clinical trials for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder interventions. Anything less and he said, “we will have failed.” His team will also be recruiting enough people with bipolar who carry genetic variants to study whether their mutations mean anything.
The more they show what's possible, Neale said, the more players they'll draw to their effort.
Jon, a founding board member of the nonprofit Treatment Advocacy Center, has been around long enough that he tries not to get too excited about any breakthrough. His family's confidence in the Broad Institute stems not from its successes, but its processes.
“It’s not just shaking a test tube and seeing if it turns blue or red," Jon said. "They’ll notice things and analyze the data in a way that, even if it doesn’t work, they’ll learn something.”
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