Soulful Asylum

INSIDE BOSTON'S FABLED MENTAL HOSPITAL

Even if Sylvia Plath's and Susanna Kayseri's stays there hadn't resulted in The Bell Jar and Girl, Interrupted, McLean, the elite mental hospital outside Boston, might have occupied a spot on the literary landscape anyway. Anne Sexton went because she wanted to follow in Plath's and Robert Lowell's footsteps; singer Ray Charles later crowed in his autobiography, Brother Ray, about "getting next to" McLean nurses. In Gracefully Insane: The Rise and Fall of America's Premier Mental Hospital (PublicAffairs), Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam provides a candid and engrossing look at the hospital's history since 1817. While the stories about the famous patients who checked into the refuge for screwball Mayflower descendants are what will draw most readers to the book, Beam's work is actually more interesting as a social history of mental illness, one that details both the evolution of treatment (from hypothermia to electroshock to lobotomies to psychopharmacology) and the reality of the marketplace (McLean, now a dependency of Harvard, has sold off much of its campus to stay afloat). The book reminds us that, while McLean's landscaped grounds, chosen by future patient Frederick Law Olmsted, are lovely, what happens on them is often not, and that psychiatrists almost never use the word "cure."

HENRY ALFORD