Recommended by Marion:
"I just read 'Gracefully Insane', about the Mclean mental hospital outside of Boston. It's had a lot of interesting patients in the past century."

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Product Description

The Boston Globe #1 bestseller and Book Sense 76 pick: A "candid and engrossing" history of "the Harvard of mental institutions," and of the evolution of psychiatric treatment.

McLean Hospital is one of the most famous, most elite, and once most luxurious mental institutions in America. Its "alumni" include Sylvia Plath, John Forbes Nash, Ray Charles and Susanna Kaysen. James Taylor found inspiration for a song or two there; Frederic Law Olmsted first designed the grounds and later signed in as a patient. In its "golden age," McLean provided as gracious and gentle an environment for the treatment of mental illness as one could imagine. But the golden age is over, and a downsized, downscale McLean is struggling to stay afloat.

Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam's Gracefully Insane is an entertaining and strangely poignant biography of McLean from its founding in 1817 through today. The story of McLean is also the story of the hopes and failures of psychology and psychotherapy; of the evolution of attitudes about mental illness; and of the economic pressures that are making McLean--and other institutions like it--relics of a bygone age.

This is fascinating reading for the many readers interested in either the literature of madness--from The Bell Jar to Girl, Interrupted to A Beautiful Mind--or in the history of its treatment.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #34694 in Books
• Published on: 2003-01
• Released on: 2003-01-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781586481612
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
Alex Beam's Gracefully Insane is a knowledgeable historical portrait of New England's McLean Hospital, until recently the mental institution equivalent of the Plaza Hotel. Fenceless and unguarded, McLean's grounds were landscaped by Frederick Law Olmsted. Amenities included tennis courts, a golf course, room service, and a riding stable. As one director said, "If you don't know where you are, then you're in the right place." Its patients have included James Taylor, Robert Lowell, and Ray Charles. It also looms large in The Bell Jar and Girl, Interrupted, written by former patients Sylvia Plath and Susanna Kaysen. Beam weaves patients' and employees' stories with an informal review of mental health treatments through the years, including lobotomies, insulin-induced comas, ice-water baths, and a ghastly device called the "coercion chair." Gracefully Insane is amiable, lively, and honest. Its many anecdotes (derived from patient records, journals, and interviews) are by turns poignant, humorous, and unsettling. --H. O'Billovitch

From Publishers Weekly
"The insane asylum seems to be the goal of every good and conscious Bostonian," Clover Adams wrote in 1879. The asylum she was referring to is the now legendary McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., and in this fascinating, gossipy social history, Boston Globe columnist Beam pries open its well-guarded records for a look at the life of the storied institution. McLean is best known today for its parade of famous patients like Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, Ray Charles and all three Taylor children. But these notable "alumni" followed in the footsteps of generations of privileged clientele drawn primarily from Boston's most elite families. From its 1817 inception, McLean's trustees aimed to provide a discreet and appropriately opulent setting for the convalescence of the upper classes. The 250-acre grounds a scattering of Tudor mansions among scrub woods and groomed lawns were planned by landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted (later a McLean patient himself). The hospital offered private rooms, tennis courts, a bowling alley and the latest cures. Beam traces the hospital's place in the history of psychiatric treatment, from the early days of ice water therapies and moral management through the introduction of modern psychopharmacology. He discusses McLean's current condition neither individuals nor insurers can afford McLean's long-term care, and the downsized hospital faces an uncertain future. More than a history of a psychiatric institution, the book offers an unusual glimpse of a celebrated American estate: the Boston aristocracy that produced, for nearly two centuries, an endless stream of brilliant, troubled eccentrics and the equally brilliant and eccentric doctors who lined up to treat them. B&w photos. Agent, Michael Carlisle.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

This quirky work of social history recounts the story of McLean Hospital, a trendy mental institution affiliated with Harvard University, from its genteel beginnings in the early 19th century to its downsized status today. Through interviews and analyses of archival sources, Beam, a Boston Globe journalist and author of two novels (Fellow Travelers; The Americans Are Coming!), provides an oddly entertaining narrative that reads easily and supplies fascinating details about business, pop music, and literary figures. Casual readers may be drawn to tales that inspired the film Girl, Interrupted and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar. Name-dropping is rampant, reflecting one former patient's view that staying at McLean was comparable to attending a progressive college. Less successful is Beam's attempt to generalize about the history of mental healthcare from such a unique case. He subtly criticizes the mental health establishment that permitted care to be so heavily influenced by socioeconomic status and whose treatment paradigms shifted so wildly from hydrotherapy and lobotomies to "talking cures" and psychopharmacology. Recommended for large public and regional libraries as well as specialized history of mental health collections. Antoinette M. Brinkman, M.L.S., Evansville, IN

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Customer Reviews

entertaining and erudite
I really enjoyed reading Gracefully Insane: The Rise and Fall of America's Premier Mental Hospital. It's a book that I found both entertaining and erudite. Alex Beam's exceptional writing talent brings to life a colorful and misunderstood institution, the famous McLean Hospital. He effortlessly interweaves annecdotal stories of the rich, famous, and talented (not necessarily in that order) with an insightful look into the history of mental health in America. I find this book to be both scholarly and a tantalizing read--no mean feat! Beam captures the tragic/comic aspects of his complex subject in a way that leaves me feeling wistful for the days when patients were able to stay long enough in a hospital to receive therapeutic benefits. Ultimately, the author vividly captures a McLean Hospital that, despite its faults and shortcomings, provided a much needed asylum from modern life for many fortunate enough to afford it.

Breakdowns of the Rich and Famous
By the time McLean Hospital opened its doors in the mid-19th century, mental
illness had been treated by such methods as lowering the patient into a
dungeon filled with snakes, pelting him with vigorous spouts of cold water,
inducing vomiting, draining great quantities of blood, spinning him on a
rotating board, dosing him with opium and hashish, and soaking him in a warm,
electrified bath. Founded at the dawn of the Freudian age, McLean offered
something revolutionary: fresh-baked rolls and art lessons, therapy by
landscaping. Alex Beam gives us a fascinating tour of the next century in
what one doctor bemoaned as the "medical playground" of psychiatry. On the
manicured campus in Belmont, doctors adopted and then rejected lobotomy,
adopted and rejected Freudian analysis, and were finally drawn with all their
profession in the direction of psychopharmacology. Anne Sexton taught poetry
there before her own suicide, and Sylvia Plath and Susanna Kaysen emerged
with syllabus-ready memoirs, and one patient of Freud's greeted doctors every
morning by saying "I am my father's penis." Beam is a skeptical inquirer, and
his book may ruffle the feathers of local psychiatrists. (Has ruffled.) But for ordinary readers, he does what few writers
have done -- tell with humor and intelligence the story of doctors and
patients groping through their suffering and toward some kind of answer.

Mental Health for Those with Wealth
We still have psychiatric asylums, places where those intractable patients of minimal hope of improvement are kept. It is useful to look at the original sense of the word "asylum," which meant a sanctuary, where those inside could take refuge from the outside. Such refuge is no longer the fashion, with "community care" (and plenty of antipsychotic medicines) deemed a sufficient refuge for most. But the rich are different, as everyone knows, and it used to be that there were posh institutes where a family could house (or warehouse) a dotty cousin and could rely upon discretion to keep the patient quiet and quietly removed from society, or Society. Now there is a biography of one of these institutions, one which had a reputation among the moneyed as being the best in the business. _Gracefully Insane: The Rise and Fall of American's Premier Mental Hospital_ (PublicAffairs) by Alex Beam tells the story of McLean Hospital, which had a long guest register of famous and moneyed clients.

Beam does not spend much time on the early history of the hospital. In 1895 it moved to its grand grounds in the woodsy Boston suburbs and it became home to "an improved class of sufferers." It housed a rather amazing cast of characters, and perhaps in tune with the upbeat and upscale McLean atmosphere, they are presented as amusing eccentrics. Beam does not emphasize the pain of their conditions, but he does show the futility of treatment (insulin shock, hydrotherapy, talk therapies, electroshock) for most of them. As pharmaceutical therapies and then managed-care became the way to treat psychiatric patients, McLean lagged behind. Many of the patients stayed on and on, getting expensive care paid in a lump initial sum by families who never wanted to see them again. The hospital is selling off its grand properties and is also going back to its roots; a new, small facility called the Pavilion will take psychiatric care of those whose families can afford $1,800 a night, and it is proving to be popular.

McLean's story is thus part of the larger modern history of inpatient psychiatric treatment, but it is a peculiar one because of its elite patients. It is a remarkable list who stayed there, and they were not all distinguished only by having wealth. The poets Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath wrote about their stays, as did Susanna Kaysen, author of _Girl Interrupted_. John Nash, of _A Beautiful Mind_, was there, as were James Taylor and his brother Livingston and sister Kate. Ray Charles was there following a drug bust. The celebrity patients come and go through these pages, which more importantly contain a entertaining history writ small of American psychiatry.