Gracefully Insane: The Rise and Fall of America's Premier Mental Hospital

Beam, Alex

ISBN 10: 1891620754 / ISBN 13: 9781891620751

Published by PublicAffairs, 2001

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 1891620754-3-32422934

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Gracefully Insane: The Rise and Fall of America's Premier Mental Hospital
• Publisher: PublicAffairs
• Publication Date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1891620754
• ISBN 13: 9781891620751
• Binding: hardcover
• Condition: Good
• Weight: 22 ounces

About this title

Synopsis

Its carefully landscaped grounds, chosen by Frederick Law Olmsted and dotted with four-and-five-story Tudor mansions, could belong to a prosperous New England prep school. There are no fences, no guards, no locked gates. But McLean Hospital is a mental institution - one of the most famous, most elite, and once most luxurious in America. McLean "alumni" include many of the troubled geniuses of our age - Olmsted himself, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, James Taylor and Ray Charles - as well as (more secretly) other notables from among the rich and famous. In its "golden age," McLean provided as gracious and gentle an enviroment for the treatment of mental illness as one could imagine. "If the patient did not like the lamb we served for dinner and asked for lobster, we gave lobster," one steward recalled. "They could afford it. Appleton House [the men's ward] was like the Ritz Carlton." But the golden age is over, and a downsized, downscale McLean is struggling to find its place in today's brave new world of psychopharmacologically-oriented mental health care.

About the Author

Alex Beam is a columnist for the Boston Globe and the author of two novels. He has also written for the Atlantic Monthly, Slate and Forbes/FYI. He lives in Newton, Massachusetts with his wife and three sons.