Gracefully Insane: The Rise and Fall Of America's Premier Mental Hospital [Paperback]

This book will make you think about the (troubled) history of psychiatry/ treatment of mental illness, and Beam's portrait of this institution caused me to shed no tears for the fall of this fabled refuge for blue blooded loons.

Reading interviews with "graduates", its hard not to question the assumptions that underlied McLean's very reasons for existence. Few of the individuals profiled within seem like they were ever a "danger to self or others". Indeed, when a rash of suicides hit McLean a couple of decades ago, the staff were singularly unprepared to cope. Perhaps this is because the "inmates" were not as bad off as one might suppose?

Makes an interesting companion piece for Goffman's "Asylums".

Mental health care has come a long way from less enlightened times when, according to author Alex Beam, terrorizing patients into wellness was considered effective:

"One German asylum lowered patients into a dungeon filled with snakes." (My mother, a psychiatrist, once told me about a patient of hers who saw pink snakes on the ceiling. Hmmm, I wonder where Mom did her residency.)

The narrative is at its best when describing the evolution of 19th and 20th century methods of therapy: cold water dunking, bath treatments (hot air, electric light, vapor, salt, sitz, loofah), insulin coma, electroshock, metrazole shock, lobotomy, Freudian analysis, and psychopharmacology. Unfortunately, the author fleshes out the text by describing the experiences of specifically named individuals undergoing such cures, usually at McLean. It was then that my eyes began to glaze over and GRACEFULLY INSANE becomes almost a work of local interest since most of the inmates came from Boston's social upper crust, which regarded the hospital as a handy dumping ground for mentally challenged and inconvenient family members.

I was briefly re-invigorated when a 1948 sex scandal involving McLean's psychiatrist-in-chief and a nurse got the pair prosecuted on a Morals Charge (Oh, puhleeze!). And later in the 60s and 70s, when the badly behaved teenage children of the local gentry, relegated to the institution by clueless parents for too much drugs, sex, and rock 'n' roll, upset the traditionally genteel environment.

While mildly entertaining and reasonably informative, GRACEFULLY INSANE came across as too much of a niche market product, appealing perhaps mostly to mental health professionals, residents of Boston and its environs, and fans of certain famous and terminally dysfunctional (i.e. suicidal) poets of New England heritage. I don't fall into any of these categories, though I'm now sufficiently interested to purchase THE BELL JAR and MOUNT MISERY, the former by Sylvia Plath based on her sojourn at McLean, and the latter by Dr. Stephen Bergman (pen name Samuel Shem) based on his medical residency there.

I'll give GRACEFULLY INSANE to my Mom. She can remember the Good Ol' Days of electroshock fondly.