Armando E. Colombo
President and Chief Executive Officer
Leadership
Houston,
The century-old American psychiatric name that still publishes what happens to its clients a full year after they go home.
Menninger is the only clinic in this ranking that publishes measured outcomes on a named cohort: 1,823 adult clients treated between 2019 and 2021, tracked from admission through discharge to one year post-discharge. It is a not-for-profit psychiatric hospital on a purpose-built fifty-acre campus in south Houston, founded in Kansas in 1925 by the family that shaped twentieth-century American psychiatry and relocated to Texas in 2003. The state register lists it as a licensed private psychiatric hospital with 96 psychiatric beds. Every psychiatrist and psychologist who treats there holds a faculty appointment in the Menninger Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Baylor College of Medicine and is employed by Baylor, so the clinical staff is in effect a university psychiatry department. Admissions are voluntary only, and the caseload is the hardest end of the field.
Assessed: The clinic has a full assessment in this edition: all ten criteria scored, each with its reasoning, its sources with capture dates, and the gaps we could not close. It does not mean every fact is confirmed. How well the evidence holds up is shown by the confidence rating. What our labels mean
The clinic publishes a leadership page and a staff directory of 118 named people, each with a profile page. Every psychiatrist and psychologist who treats here holds a faculty appointment in the Menninger Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Baylor College of Medicine and is employed by Baylor, so the clinical staff is in effect a university psychiatry department.
President and Chief Executive Officer
Leadership
Senior Vice President and Chief of Staff, overseeing clinical care
Leadership
Chief Medical Officer
Leadership
Vice President, Clinical Services
Leadership
Chief Nursing Officer
Leadership
Medical Director, Addictions Services, leading the Detox Service
Clinical
Division Director, Inpatient Division
Clinical
Director, Menninger Assessment Center
Clinical
Individual state licence numbers are not published for any clinician. Faculty ranks were confirmed against the university department's own faculty lists.
Not published per programme; the clinic-wide average inpatient stay is 17 days
USD 1,980 per day
The main adult inpatient service, with tracks for depression, anxiety, trauma, bipolar disorder, personality disorders and substance use. It is built for people whose illness has already defeated shorter admissions elsewhere, and diagnostic reformulation is treated as a deliverable in its own right rather than a by-product.
Six to eight weeks
Not published as a package
For adults whose illness has damaged their relationships with themselves and with others, covering depressive and bipolar disorders, personality disorders and substance use. The programme is candid that it uses the peer group deliberately: isolation and hopelessness are broken by other clients with similar histories, not by staff alone.
Six to eight weeks on average
Not published as a package
A supervised hospital-based programme for ages 18 to 30 whose development has stalled through psychiatric illness, substance use or failure to launch. It runs clinical treatment alongside the practical work of re-entering education and employment.
Inpatient stay with partial hospitalisation and intensive outpatient step-downs
-
A separate adolescent unit with schooling support and a substantial family component, treating mood, anxiety, trauma, self-harm and emerging personality pathology. Some adolescent services are in network with commercial insurers.
Not published
-
A residential step-down for adults leaving inpatient care who are not yet ready for outpatient life, holding structure in place while independence is rebuilt. Individual therapy runs twice weekly alongside daily group work.
Not published
-
Community re-integration through mentored apartment living with twenty-four hour support, combining individual and group therapy, psychoeducational groups and vocational assistance. It is the most independent rung on the ladder and the closest thing here to supported living.
One week
-
A week-long multidisciplinary evaluation producing a diagnostic formulation and a treatment plan, available without admission. It is the direct comparator to the assessment products offered elsewhere in this ranking.
Course-based
Electroconvulsive therapy, inpatient: USD 2,990 per day · Electroconvulsive therapy, outpatient: USD 2,990 per day
Transcranial magnetic stimulation, ketamine and electroconvulsive therapy for treatment-resistant depression and related conditions, delivered inside an academic hospital rather than a standalone infusion clinic.
Not published
USD 1,580 per day
Medically supervised withdrawal management on a licensed hospital unit with twenty-four hour registered nursing, led by the medical director for addictions services.
Ongoing
-
Menninger 360 is assertive community treatment delivered into the home, school and community. Home Base provides post-traumatic stress, anxiety and depression services to veterans and military families.
| Programme | Price | Period | As of | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Inpatient, all programmes | USD 1,980 | day | Prices as of 2026-09-17 | |
| Inpatient detoxification | USD 1,580 | day | Prices as of 2026-09-17 | |
| Residential, psychiatric | USD 1,580 | day | Prices as of 2026-09-17 | |
| Partial hospitalisation, intensive, adult | USD 890 | day | Prices as of 2026-09-17 | |
| Partial hospitalisation, intensive, adolescent | USD 890 | day | Prices as of 2026-09-17 | |
| Partial hospitalisation, less intensive, adult | USD 890 | day | Prices as of 2026-09-17 | |
| Partial hospitalisation, less intensive, adolescent | USD 890 | day | Prices as of 2026-09-17 | |
| Intensive outpatient programme, psychiatric | USD 450 | day | Prices as of 2026-09-17 | |
| Intensive outpatient programme, substance use | USD 450 | day | Prices as of 2026-09-17 | |
| Electroconvulsive therapy, inpatient | USD 2,990 | day | Prices as of 2026-09-17 | |
| Electroconvulsive therapy, outpatient | USD 2,990 | day | Prices as of 2026-09-17 | |
| Family psychotherapy, 50 minutes, without the client present | USD 370 | one off | Prices as of 2026-09-17 | |
| Family psychotherapy, 50 minutes, with the client present | USD 370 | one off | Prices as of 2026-09-17 | |
| Psychotherapy with a psychologist, 30 minutes | USD 190 | one off | Prices as of 2026-09-17 | |
| Psychotherapy with a psychologist, 45 minutes | USD 270 | one off | Prices as of 2026-09-17 | |
| Psychotherapy with a psychologist, 60 minutes | USD 370 | one off | Prices as of 2026-09-17 | |
| New outpatient visit, 60 minutes | USD 500 | one off | Prices as of 2026-09-17 | |
| Outpatient consultation, 60 minutes | USD 750 | one off | Prices as of 2026-09-17 |
The consumer review body here is large, unmanaged and unclaimed, with visible negative reviews and no sign of seeding or suppression. The gap between a middling consumer rating and decades of top-tier professional ranking is the familiar hospital pattern: the outcomes are strong, being acutely unwell in a hospital is not enjoyable, and consumer reviews measure the second thing. A separate listing reports a different rating on a smaller, differently sampled body, and both are recorded rather than averaged. On regulatory standing, stated factually: in November 2015 a client left a supervised group outing unaccompanied and died. The state health department cited three violations of state rules on care and safety and issued fines totalling USD 75,000. The clinic contested the sanctions and, after an administrative hearing, agreed in 2017 to pay a reduced USD 56,250; the final order records that the clinic denied wrongdoing, as reported at the time. The same newspaper reported on the case in 2016, and its editorial board separately criticised the state statute that requires investigation findings to be kept confidential to the investigated hospital. No lawsuit, regulatory action or enforcement against the clinic was found for the period 2018 to 2026.
The consumer review body here is large, unmanaged and unclaimed, with visible negative reviews and no sign of seeding or suppression. The gap between a middling consumer rating and decades of top-tier professional ranking is the familiar hospital pattern: the outcomes are strong, being acutely unwell in a hospital is not enjoyable, and consumer reviews measure the second thing. A separate listing reports a different rating on a smaller, differently sampled body, and both are recorded rather than averaged. On regulatory standing, stated factually: in November 2015 a client left a supervised group outing unaccompanied and died. The state health department cited three violations of state rules on care and safety and issued fines totalling USD 75,000. The clinic contested the sanctions and, after an administrative hearing, agreed in 2017 to pay a reduced USD 56,250; the final order records that the clinic denied wrongdoing, as reported at the time. The same newspaper reported on the case in 2016, and its editorial board separately criticised the state statute that requires investigation findings to be kept confidential to the investigated hospital. No lawsuit, regulatory action or enforcement against the clinic was found for the period 2018 to 2026.
Coverage is largely professional and local rather than promotional. The clinic's own media page lists twelve clinical experts available for interview, which is a further public naming of the clinical bench.
Ranked among the best hospitals for psychiatry for 32 consecutive years, currently twelfth nationally, alongside four ANCC Pathway to Excellence designations. These are professional rankings and credentials rather than commercial awards.
A fifty-acre purpose-built campus in south Houston, opened in May 2012 and designed from the ground up as a psychiatric hospital. The grounds are the strong point: a saltwater swimming pool open from late May to mid-October, a fully equipped gymnasium with a full-court basketball court, a walking labyrinth, a courtyard laid out for walking and jogging, a sculpture garden used for meditation, a non-denominational chapel, an on-site kitchen garden that supplies the kitchen, a spacious dining room and a campus cafe. The Texas Medical Center, the largest medical complex in the world and the home of Baylor College of Medicine, is roughly twenty minutes away. Room configuration is not published. Nothing on the site states whether bedrooms are private or shared, and no private-room supplement is advertised, so shared accommodation should be assumed unless the clinic says otherwise. Clients are issued a clinic mobile phone rather than keeping their own handset, and visiting hours are described as liberal.
Meals are cooked in-house daily by a named executive chef, Russell Knott, previously of one of Houston's best-known restaurants, with produce coming in part from an on-site kitchen garden. Gluten-free and vegetarian options are standard, and there is a campus cafe alongside the dining room. This is meaningfully better than institutional hospital catering and the chef credential is real and attributable. What is absent at the top of the scale: no dietitian or clinical nutritionist appears on the amenities page, there is no published personalised nutrition protocol, and no dietary, micronutrient or food-sensitivity testing programme. Meals are served communally rather than plated to an individual protocol. Kitchen hygiene falls under hospital accreditation standards.
shared setting
None of the three separation levels is met here. This is a licensed psychiatric hospital running group-based inpatient programmes on a shared campus with a shared dining room, a shared gymnasium, a shared saltwater pool, a shared chapel and shared grounds. One adult programme builds treatment on contact between clients as an explicit mechanism. Clients see each other constantly, by design. Visiting hours are described as liberal, and clients are issued a clinic mobile phone with which to arrange visits and teleconferences, which controls outbound contact but also brings visitors on to campus in numbers. The clinic publishes no confidentiality policy beyond standard statutory rights, no client-separation protocol and no confidentiality section in its FAQ. There is no executive wing, no separate discreet entrance and no executive-only accommodation. Room configuration is not published, so single occupancy cannot be claimed either. No leak of a named client's stay was found. The 2015 regulatory case, which ended in a reduced, settled penalty with the clinic denying wrongdoing, concerned supervision rather than confidentiality, though it placed a client's care in the press and in a state enforcement record. The assessment is a clean confidentiality record inside a structurally low-privacy model.
Headline basis: Public evidenceThe headline number is the public score, not the extended score., LROAS 1.0.0, edition 2026-10-01
Public-evidence total: 54
The sum of the ten criterion scores, from 10 to 100, using evidence anyone can check, including the clinic's own pages as self-declared statements. For the licence element of C2 only, it can also use an authority ruling held in our sealed evidence room. It is the only number used for the rank.
ConfidenceHow well the evidence supports the score.: medium. ProvisionalA check was still open when the edition closed, for example a register lookup or a video not yet received, or evidence under embargo.: C10.
Adult clients have private bedrooms with a private bathroom, but they meet daily in groups on shared units and share dining, amenities and grounds on one hospital campus, and the licensed site and the 21-resident Bridge programme alone put the site above 20 clients. The clinic publishes a measure beyond statute that protects other clients: clinic phones without a camera and a no-photograph rule, which meets the second limb of band 4. Band 5 requires 10 or fewer clients on site, which is not met. No one-client claim is made and no contradiction in bed or room counts was found, so no cap or deduction applies.
ConfidenceHow well the evidence supports the score.: high
The clinic holds Texas HHSC private psychiatric hospital licence 100144 (expiry 30 April 2028), names a physician Chief Medical Officer and a physician Chief of Staff overseeing clinical care, and runs medically managed withdrawal on its Stabilization Program. Round-the-clock medical cover is taken as inherent in the psychiatric hospital licence; the clinic is itself hospital-licensed; The Joint Commission lists it as accredited (provider 3007); and defined tracks exist for psychotic, bipolar and personality disorders. That is both core elements plus five further elements including on-site cover and hospital status, which gives band 9. Band 10 needs published non-psychiatric physician care, which was not found.
ConfidenceHow well the evidence supports the score.: high
Three elements are met: a four and a half day multidisciplinary outpatient psychiatric assessment available without admission, diagnostic assessment treated as part of the admission, and psychological and neuropsychological testing on site. No admission laboratory panel is published, and on the Bridge programme external medical or lab tests and neuropsychiatric testing are billed as add-ons, so the element for a routine admission workup is not met and the band stays at 5.
ConfidenceHow well the evidence supports the score.: medium
No individual session count is published for the inpatient programmes, and the residential Bridge programme states twice-weekly individual therapy, so therapy intensity sits at the not published band. Care is delivered by programme teams that serve a unit of clients rather than a team assigned to one client. Nothing published supports a higher band.
ConfidenceHow well the evidence supports the score.: low
Seven continuity elements are met, including residential step-down from inpatient care, assertive community treatment through Menninger 360, partial hospitalisation and intensive outpatient services in the standard charges file, the Navigator programme with up to four hours of contact a week, a free alumni programme and coordination with outpatient resources. No aftercare duration or minimum is published, which caps the criterion at band 6.
ConfidenceHow well the evidence supports the score.: medium
The sweep of the clinic's domains found no self-ranking page, no shared account-level technical marker and no text addressed to AI systems (llms.txt returns HTTP 404), and no paid recognition presented as independent press. Two positive signals are met: published standard charges that are not called negotiable, and referral elsewhere when a programme is not the right fit. The statement that the clinic does not accept involuntary admissions is read as a bare voluntary-admission statement and is not counted as a third signal, and no referral-fee position is published, so the band is 6 rather than 7.
ConfidenceHow well the evidence supports the score.: medium
Five transparency elements are met: the licence number in the clinic's standard charges file, the legal entity with registered address, ownership consistent with audited accounts and the IRS nonprofit record, a named external complaints route, and published statements of the limits of what the clinic treats. The standard charges file lists a general residential psychiatric per-diem that is not the same line as the Bridge programme rate, so it is not treated as two figures for one fee and no contradiction deduction applies. No page states what a daily rate includes, early-departure terms carry no fee term, and no records retention period is published, which keeps the band at 5.
ConfidenceHow well the evidence supports the score.: high
The Texas Department of State Health Services closed a matter by final agreed order in February 2017 finding three violations of state rules on the care and safety of clients, with a penalty reduced from USD 75,000 to USD 56,250 after an administrative hearing; the clinic denied wrongdoing in the order. A regulator fine is graded as a serious finding, and it is between 5 and 10 years old. No regulator inspection graded good or better is dated after it (accreditation decisions are scored in C2), so the band is 3. Other court matters found were dismissed, without a public outcome, or concern a predecessor entity and are not scored.
ConfidenceHow well the evidence supports the score.: medium
Environment and safety meets six elements, including a purpose-built 50-acre campus in the Texas Medical Center, a published prohibited-items policy, nurse-administered medication and a hospital with a 24-hour emergency department 12 minutes (9.5 km) by road on a Leading Rehabs route check. Band 7 for this part needs an element that is not met, so it scores 6. Nutrition meets three elements (a named executive chef, a kitchen garden and standard dietary options, with registered dietitians named only by role), which caps it at 5. The criterion is the mean of 6 and 5, rounded half up to 6.
ConfidenceHow well the evidence supports the score.: high
The clinic states that its psychiatrists, psychologists and physicians are Baylor College of Medicine faculty, and the named treating clinicians appear on the department's own faculty lists; the facility licence is confirmed on the state register and all five gates are met. The credential index computed from the named roster falls in the band 7 range. No PubMed author count reaches the publication marker threshold.
ProvisionalA check was still open when the edition closed, for example a register lookup or a video not yet received, or evidence under embargo.: Clinician register lookups for this criterion were still open at the edition cut-off (see known_gaps). The points count as assessed on the evidence available; the band may change when the lookups are completed, which is resolved in a later edition.
ConfidenceHow well the evidence supports the score.: medium
Menninger publishes no programme price, package price or consumer rate card, and its financial information page directs enquirers to call admissions. The one price the clinic itself publishes is its federally mandated standard-charges file, which gives USD 1,980 per day as the gross and discounted cash rate for inpatient care, USD 1,580 per day for inpatient detoxification and USD 2,990 per day for inpatient electroconvulsive therapy, in a file dated 30 March 2026. On the cash rate, a six-week stay works out at roughly USD 83,000, though the clinic does not offer or publish it as a package. Menninger is in network with several major insurers for some services and runs a financial assistance policy that provides medically necessary care at no cost to those who qualify.
A purpose-built fifty-acre campus at 12301 South Main Street in south Houston, Texas, opened in 2012. The grounds carry a seasonal saltwater pool, a full-court gymnasium, a chapel, a sculpture garden, a walking labyrinth and a kitchen garden that supplies the kitchen. The Texas Medical Center, the largest medical complex in the world and the home of Baylor College of Medicine, is about twenty minutes away. Houston Hobby and Bush Intercontinental both serve the city.
People whose psychiatric illness has already defeated shorter treatment. The clinic publishes the profile itself: 80 percent of admitted clients carry at least three psychiatric diagnoses, more than half have a substance or behavioural addiction alongside psychiatric illness, and the average client arrives after three prior hospitalisations. There are separate tracks for adults, young adults aged 18 to 30 and adolescents, plus a week-long outpatient assessment for people who mainly need a reliable diagnosis. All admissions are voluntary. It is not a discretion product: this is a hospital where clients live, eat and work in groups.
Admission starts with a call to the Care Coordination Center, which connects the caller to an admissions coordinator; an appointment is not required but is strongly recommended. The clinic accepts no involuntary commitments, so every admission is negotiated with the client. No waiting time is published, but the licensed bed count against a 17-day average inpatient stay implies steady turnover, so access is normally a matter of days to a few weeks rather than months.
Menninger is built as a ladder rather than a single admission. The Bridge Program provides residential step-down, Pathfinder offers mentored apartment living with 24/7 support and vocational assistance, and Menninger 360 delivers assertive community treatment into the home, school and workplace. There is also partial hospitalisation, a recovery intensive outpatient programme, outpatient therapy and a case-management service. Outcomes are tracked to one year after discharge and published, which is why the clinic can say what happens to people after they leave rather than only while they are in.