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 environment 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.
Gracefully Insane, by Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam, is a fascinating and emotional biography of McLean Hospital from its founding in 1817 through today, based on original research. McLean's own records, and interviews with former and current patients and staff. It is filled with stories about patients and doctors: the Ralph Waldo Emerson protege whose brilliance disappeared along with his madness; Anne Sexton's poetry seminar; the analyst (and McLean patient) whose own analysis was disastrously botched by Sigmund Freud himself, and many more. The story of McLean is also the story of the hopes and failures of psychology and psychotherapy, the evolution of attitudes about mental illness and approaches to treatment, and of the economic pressures that are making McLean -- and other institutions like it -- relics of a bygone age.
Finally, Gracefully Insane is, in the author's words, "a book about the men and women who needed shelter more than most of us, or who, in some cases, were more honest about their need for protection than we are. And about an institution that provided that shelter, imperfectly, in our imperfect world."
This is compelling and often poignant reading for those who have been moved by books like Plath's The Bell Jar and Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted (both inspired by their authors' stays at McLean) and for anyone interested in mental health care, in the history of medicine, or in the social history of New England
生命让人难以忍受,谁能不体谅那些人对于庇护所的需求?谁能不同情那些寻求庇护的人们?谁能不对于提供庇护的地方感兴趣? ——艾里克斯•宾恩 《雅致的精神病院》 把一个聪明人关在某个地方,加一堆规矩在他身上,他会怎样?沿着这个思路,美国...
评分没看,没看完.最近正在调整自己,看这种书会前功尽弃. 我有个老朋友,少年时期的梦想就是住在精神病院里.在当时天真没想法的我看来,她是一个神秘的人. 她读很多书,写得一手好文章,好字.大学却去学了信息工程,时隔七年再见,她的样子一点也没有变,穿戴,举止,神态,完全是少年时期的样...
评分生命让人难以忍受,谁能不体谅那些人对于庇护所的需求?谁能不同情那些寻求庇护的人们?谁能不对于提供庇护的地方感兴趣? ——艾里克斯•宾恩 《雅致的精神病院》 把一个聪明人关在某个地方,加一堆规矩在他身上,他会怎样?沿着这个思路,美国...
评分没看,没看完.最近正在调整自己,看这种书会前功尽弃. 我有个老朋友,少年时期的梦想就是住在精神病院里.在当时天真没想法的我看来,她是一个神秘的人. 她读很多书,写得一手好文章,好字.大学却去学了信息工程,时隔七年再见,她的样子一点也没有变,穿戴,举止,神态,完全是少年时期的样...
评分没看,没看完.最近正在调整自己,看这种书会前功尽弃. 我有个老朋友,少年时期的梦想就是住在精神病院里.在当时天真没想法的我看来,她是一个神秘的人. 她读很多书,写得一手好文章,好字.大学却去学了信息工程,时隔七年再见,她的样子一点也没有变,穿戴,举止,神态,完全是少年时期的样...
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