The Stanley Family Foundation has renewed its support for the Broad Institute’s work on bipolar disorder and schizophrenia with a pledge of another $280 million to the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research, bringing the family’s total giving to more than $1 billion, the foundation said. The announcement ties the funding to a decades-long philanthropic push that began with one family member’s experience living with bipolar disorder and the treatment uncertainty he said he faced before targeted genetics-informed research.
Jon Stanley, a retired lawyer, described what he called “full-brained mania” nearly 40 years ago that left him hospitalized after what he said felt like electricity coursing through his body in New York City. He said he later responded to a medication combination that worked better for him than earlier treatment attempts. He recalled that severe mental health care at the time could be “more art than science,” with doctors trying medicines to “see if anything stuck.”
Stanley’s story is part of what his family used to frame the foundation’s research priorities, with his parents, Ted and Vada Stanley, directing hundreds of millions of dollars toward research into bipolar and schizophrenia treatments during their lifetimes. The Broad Institute, which launched in 2004 and combines faculty from MIT and Harvard with other institutions, says its multidisciplinary approach has drawn major philanthropic backers including Eli and Edythe Broad and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife, Wendy.
The family’s giving has gone “almost exclusively” to the Broad Institute, and the latest pledge reflects the Stanleys’ focus on a single research organization, according to the Associated Press report. Ben Neale, the co-director of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research, said the new funding will sustain another seven years of work aimed at understanding how these illnesses develop. Neale said the center is using rapid advances in DNA sequencing to accelerate the discovery of therapies, adding that researchers have found genes that increase risk for developing the illnesses while still having “a small fraction of what is out there to be discovered.”
Stanley recalled that his father, a prominent businessman who sold collectibles, told him he would give most of his fortune away. Stanley said the goal aligned with his father’s desire for a large, coordinated effort—describing it as a “Manhattan Project”—and he said the question was “who was gonna be Oppenheimer.” Stanley also said his parents did not, in his view, distribute money broadly among many causes; instead, he described a strategy of channeling resources so the research teams would focus on the same problem.
In recounting how his parents structured their giving, Stanley said his father became frustrated with academic research models where professors pursue separate grant-funded projects that, in his account, can overlap in aims while remaining fragmented by funder interests. Stanley said his father ultimately devoted $825 million to the Broad Institute, and that additional resources were available for further commitments when stock investments performed better than expected, making it possible for the foundation to expand its support.
As the latest gift lands, the Associated Press report also noted the broader challenge of developing mental health treatments, citing experts who say the scale of need remains larger than the funding and coordination currently available. Sylvie Raver, a senior director at the Milken Institute’s Science Philanthropy Accelerator for Research and Collaboration, said that while federal government support for mental health exceeded $2 billion annually between 2019 and 2024, studies show schizophrenia alone costs the United States more than $300 billion a year—partly because care systems are fragmented and do not treat people proactively enough. Raver said she also has seen declines in support for serious mental illness at the National Institutes of Health and argued that existing research funding can be siloed and not necessarily targeted to families affected by conditions like those studied by the Stanley Center.
The report said private industry faces its own constraints in psychiatric drug development, and Neale said the difficulty of developing drugs dampened enthusiasm. Neale told the Associated Press that researchers still do not understand the “fundamental pathology” underlying illnesses like bipolar disorder, and he said the center aims to catalyze the rest of the field. In describing near-term research goals, he said the center wants to jumpstart clinical trials for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder interventions and to recruit enough people with bipolar disorder who carry genetic variants so researchers can study whether those mutations are linked to illness.
Stanley said his family’s confidence in the Broad Institute stems not from guaranteed breakthroughs but from what he described as an approach centered on noticing patterns and analyzing data even when results do not work out. “It’s not just shaking a test tube and seeing if it turns blue or red,” he said, adding that researchers “will learn something,” even if a particular experiment fails.