Gracefully Insane The Rise And Fall Of America's Premier Mental Hospital - Hardcover

Beam, Alex

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1891620754 ISBN 13: 9781891620751

Verlag: PublicAffairs, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

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.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Alex Beam is a columnist for the Boston Globe and the author of two novels. He has also written for the Atlantic Monthly, Slate and Forbes/FYI. He lives in Newton, Massachusetts with his wife and three sons.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: PublicAffairs
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2001
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1891620754
• ISBN 13: 9781891620751
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar