Austen Riggs Center

The Austen Riggs Center is a psychiatric treatment facility founded in 1913 in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

History

Founding – 1946

A New York City internist who repaired to Stockbridge, MA while suffering from tuberculosis, Austen Fox Riggs developed a treatment regimen that both anticipated the rise of psychosomatic medicine and therapeutic psychology, and forged a new direction for residential care.

Riggs was influenced by the mental hygiene movement (also known as the social hygiene movement). He developed his residential model after observing a physician in Bethel, Maine named John George Gehring, who treated patients through strict daily regimens and treatments through suggestion.

Opened in 1913 as The Stockbridge Institute for the Study and Treatment of the Psychoneuroses, the Institute incorporated in 1919 as the Austen Riggs Foundation. Riggs grew quickly; it had 100 patients by 1924, with average stays of four to six weeks. A staff of doctors handled no more than 10 patients each, and physicians in training joined regular staff meetings and conferences. A series of “green books" summed up Riggs’s "precepts for successful living" and an associate from the 1930s said that patients were encouraged to be “a valuable member of a united team.”