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

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 enviroment 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.