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

Gracefully Insane‬: The Rise and Fall of America's Premier Mental Hospital [2001] - ★★★1/2

This non-fiction book is about McLean Hospital in New England, “one of America’s oldest and most prestigious mental hospitals” [Beam, 2001: 1], whose residents once included mathematician John Nash and authors Susanna Kaysen (Girl, Interrupted [1993]) and Sylvia Path (The Bell Jar [1963]). Comprised of beautiful Tudor mansions and set in a picturesque area, the institution became the first mental hospital in Boston and has been called a “cultural museum”. It also inspired Dennis Lehane's thriller Shutter Island [2003], and is an unusual mental hospital in many respects. McLean was known not only for its celebrity-patients and “moral treatment”, but also for its patient rooms furnished with every comfort, tennis courts, extensive gardens and free-standing cottages for its aristocratic clientele. From the hospital’s founding in 1811 to the late 1990s, Alex Beam traces the history of this institution, emphasising the contributions of different individuals on its development and how changes in the treatment of mental disorders throughout the two centuries impacted the running, structure and the organisation of McLean. We read both the doctors and the patients’ accounts.

Beam’s book may be chaotic and disjointed, but it is interesting, especially in its insights offered on the rise and decline of various popular treatments to treat mental disorders (and how McLean responded to various “medical treatment” trends), including lobotomy, electroshock therapy, hydrotherapies, psychoanalysis and drugs. The book ends with the overview of the 1970-90s, which “have been a time of trouble for full-service mental hospitals” [Beam, 2001: 233], since “the world has given up on long-term, residential mental health care”, in favour of “psychopharmacology...quick diagnoses [and] rapid drug prescriptions”.