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

Alex Beam

Jul 2009 · Sold by PublicAffairs

About this ebook

Its landscaped ground, chosen by Frederick Law Olmsted and dotted with Tudor mansions, could belong to a 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 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 genteel an environment for the treatment of mental illness as one could imagine. But the golden age is over, and a downsized, downscale McLean-despite its affiliation with Harvard University-is struggling to stay afloat. Gracefully Insane, by Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam, is a fascinating and emotional biography of McLean Hospital from its founding in 1817 through today. It is filled with stories about patients and doctors: the Ralph Waldo Emerson prot'g' whose brilliance disappeared along with his madness; Anne Sexton's poetry seminar, and many more. 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, of approaches to treatment, and of the economic pressures that are making McLean-and other institutions like it-relics of a bygone age.

This is a compelling and often oddly poignant reading for fans of books like Plath's The Bell Jar and Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted (both inspired by their author's stays at McLean) and for anyone interested in the history of medicine or psychotherapy, or the social history of New England.

Ratings and reviews

You would think that when an author goes shooting his mouth off about people who have suffered bouts of mental illness, he might make some attempt to get in touch with the surviving members of their families. It is a shoddy, cheap, lazy and despicable excuse for journalism to blacken the names of highly regarded physicians with no regard of what it may do to their reputations and the reputations of family members. May Mr. Beam suffer firsthand the pains of the illnesses he so glibly describes so that he may write about them with honesty and sympathy. Now that would be true journalism, not this sensational trash that mascarades as investigative reporting.

I am the daughter of Dr. Doris Menzer Benaron, who is discussed in this book. I want to make clear that no one in our family was contacted concerning the use of her name of her story and that Beam never requested nor received permission to discuss this sensitive and private matter. Needless to say, my family is outraged.

Highly recommend for anyone involved in or interested in psychology, psychiatry, mental health, or general Boston history.

About the author

Alex Beam is a columnist for the Boston Globe and for the International Herald Tribune. He is the author of two works of nonfiction, Gracefully Insane and A Great Idea at the Time, both New York Times Notable Books. He has also written for the Atlantic Monthly, Slate, and Forbes/FYI. He lives in Newton, Massachusetts with his wife and three sons.