Jon Stanley counts himself lucky compared to many people battling bipolar disorder. Following a severe manic episode nearly four decades ago that left him unclothed in a Manhattan delicatessen, believing electrical currents were surging through the ground beneath him, he finally found a medication combination that worked.
Many patients endure much longer journeys to find effective treatment. Mental health care like his was described as “more art than science” by doctors at the time, the retired attorney recalls. Physicians would cycle through different medications hoping something would prove effective. This challenging experience motivated his deceased parents, Ted and Vada Stanley, to contribute hundreds of millions during their lives toward research for bipolar disorder and schizophrenia treatments.
Their charitable mission lives on through a fresh commitment to a biomedical partnership dedicated to understanding these conditions and developing new therapies. The Stanley Family Foundation revealed an additional $280 million donation to the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at Broad Institute this month, pushing their total support for the Massachusetts-based organization beyond $1 billion.
This commitment demonstrates their confidence in the institute’s collaborative methodology and Jon’s dedication to fulfilling his billionaire retailer father’s vision for using the wealth generated from his collectibles business.
“He said he wanted his ‘Manhattan Project,’” Jon remembered. “And so, the only question was: who was gonna be Oppenheimer?”
The Broad Institute began operations in 2004 to address disease research by combining expertise from MIT, Harvard, and additional researchers. It has drawn notable philanthropists including original donors Eli and Edythe Broad, plus former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his spouse Wendy.
The Stanley family’s contributions have been directed almost entirely to the Broad Institute — an extraordinary concentration of resources to a single organization. This unexpected new funding supports seven more years of research into how these disorders emerge. Through cutting-edge DNA sequencing technology, researchers aim to speed development of new treatments, explains Ben Neale, co-director of the Broad Institute’s Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research.
“We’ve made major discoveries of genes that dramatically increase the risk of developing these illnesses,” Neale stated. “We know we only have a small fraction of what is out there to be discovered.”
Jon was raised along Connecticut’s coastline as his father’s consumer products business, MBI, achieved greater success. The wealth “kept getting bigger,” he noted. However, his father made clear early on that he planned to donate most of their fortune.
Their philanthropic focus crystallized when Jon developed bipolar disorder at age 19. His first manic episode occurred during a London educational program while he was a Williams College student. He entertained fantasies of earning millions by establishing student housing for Americans studying overseas. Instead, he quickly exhausted his funds, swinging from mania into depression.
His condition deteriorated further upon returning to his Massachusetts liberal arts campus. During a New York City visit, he alarmed his girlfriend with paranoid remarks about secret agents tracking him. After wandering Manhattan for three days without money, he ended up in a delicatessen where he felt phantom electrical shocks attacking his body.
“So, I did the logical thing: I took my clothes off. And that’s how the cops found me,” Jon explained.
He spent six weeks in a psychiatric facility in 1987, sometimes placed in the “rubber room.” Lithium, which had already been prescribed, proved ineffective alone. Adding an anticonvulsant medication called Tegretol provided the solution.
Neither medication was originally designed for bipolar treatment. Doctors also lacked the genetic knowledge of the disease available today — including its shared risk factors with schizophrenia, an understanding advanced by the Broad Institute.
Jon’s parents were determined to change this situation.
Yet Jon emphasized his father didn’t “just start writing checks everywhere.”
His parents initially established the Stanley Medical Research Institute. As Ted grew older, Jon said he chose to direct nearly everything to the Broad Institute. Ted had grown frustrated with traditional academic research models where professors piece together grants, working independently on similar projects within a funder’s scope. He preferred concentrating all resources in one place.
“We give all the money to Broad and they’re all looking at the one problem,” he explained. “It’s much more like a wartime economy.”
His father committed $825 million total. But stock market investments for his charitable funds performed better than anticipated, creating additional money to donate.
Jon, serving as one of three Stanley Family Foundation trustees, had no hesitation about Broad receiving more funding. He views it as his duty to pursue “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?”
While mental illness research funding might seem substantial, experts warn that combined government, private industry, and philanthropic support remains inadequate compared to the burden these diseases create.
Federal funding provided over $2 billion annually for mental health research from 2019-2024. However, studies indicate schizophrenia alone costs the United States more than $300 billion yearly — partly due to fragmented care systems that fail to treat patients proactively enough, according to Sylvie Raver, a senior director at the Milken Institute’s Science Philanthropy Accelerator for Research and Collaboration.
Raver noted declining support for serious mental illness research at the National Institutes of Health. Current funding tends to be compartmentalized and doesn’t necessarily address the needs of affected 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 oversees brain disease and mental health portfolios.
Pharmaceutical companies, another research funding source, must balance shareholder profit obligations with bringing products to market. Neale noted that private industry’s struggles developing effective drugs has dampened their interest in this field.
These represent “some of the most difficult problems in all of medicine,” he acknowledged.
“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 will energize the broader field. His objective for the coming decade is launching clinical trials for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder treatments. Falling short would mean “we will have failed.” His team will also recruit sufficient numbers of bipolar patients carrying genetic variants to determine whether their mutations are significant.
The more they demonstrate what’s achievable, Neale said, the more participants they’ll attract to their mission.
Jon, a founding board member of the Treatment Advocacy Center nonprofit, has enough experience to temper his excitement about potential breakthroughs. His family’s trust in the Broad Institute comes not from its achievements, but its methodology.
“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.”
