GRACEFULLY INSANE

A history of America’s best-known insane asylum for the carriage trade.

Though McLean Hospital in Massachusetts became more than a local institution with the treatment of Robert Lowell, the publication of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, and later the musical Taylors, it has a nearly 200-year history of psychiatric service. Because the patients were, from the start, well-heeled, it was able to adopt the atmosphere of a literal asylum—a welcoming harbor to weather mental storms, free of the threatening, let alone barbaric, conditions of many such institutions. The stays were often lengthy, the therapy staff-intensive: Here one would receive the rest cure. Boston Globe columnist Beam (The Americans Are Coming!, 1991, etc.) follows the peregrinations of the institution's therapy programs, given the human-interest angle with a clutch of patient and staff histories, from hypothermia therapy and water treatments, purges and bleeding, opium and hashish, through the electric-light bath, the salt glow, and Neptune’s girdle to lobotomies and bracing administrations of electricity. But the emphasis was always on “moral therapy,” engaging the mind with literature and conversation, and exercising the body with sport and the great outdoors, the great outdoors having been shaped here by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. This was to be a home, not a hospital, a mansion, not a ward. Much has changed in the past few decades, writes Beam, with insurance companies no longer amenable to such comfy psychiatric treatment, especially so at nearly $1,000 a day. McLean is busy selling off many of its assets, including its most renowned, the atmosphere—though, as Beam points out, all that moral therapy yielded a pitiful number of measurable results on the scales of mental health.

An admirable institutional history, and more so, a captivating social history, for what makes McLean distinctive, its style and sensibility, is part and parcel of what Boston, as a cultural instance, represents. (Photographs)