Payne Whitney was a large donor to the Hospital and Medical College, and it has been an issue of long speculation why he chose a psychiatric building to be his primary naming opportunity at New York-Cornell.
Current psychiatrists and psychologists include Jack Barchas, Robert Michels, Otto F. Kernberg, James Kocsis, George Makari, Michael Posner, William Breitbart, and Theodore Shapiro.
Noted staff have included Arnold Cooper, Frederic Flach, Benjamin Spock, Gerald Klerman, Robert Millman, Louis Jolyon West, David Silbersweig, Harry Tiebout, Mary Jane Sherfey, Helen Singer Kaplan, Allen Frances, and Paul McHugh.
The poet James Schuyler wrote about his experiences there in the eleven-poem series "The Payne Whitney Poems" which appeared in the New York Review of Books, August 17, 1978, issue.
In Woody Allen's 1979 film, Manhattan, a character named Caroline Payne Whitney Smith is featured in a comedy sketch, where she and her husband are considered "normal folks," except for the fact that she is a catatonic.