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Title: Gracefully Insane: Life and Death Inside America's Premier Mental Hospital by Alex Beam ISBN: 1-58648-161-4 Publisher: PublicAffairs Pub. Date: 07 January, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.52 (27 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: Fails to paint a picture of McLean, Insanity, or Psychiatry
Comment: This book promises to depict the way in which caring of the mentally ill has changed over the last 150 years. I wish the author had kept his promise. Back when McLean was called the Boston Lunatic Asylum, life was a little different for the average schizophrenic patient. And the idea of tracing the development of psychiatry by way of a history of McLean is a great idea. Unfortunately, what we get instead is hodge-podge of Boston Brahmin gossip, architectural history, psychiatric theory, and mundane factoids. I was expecting anecdote, but I wanted revealing anecdote. For instance, Beam writes about all the McLean patients who had received lobotomies. But he never delves into how lobotomized patients acted or how they might have felt about the procedure. I would love to have known why old-time psychiatrists thought hydrotherapy was useful for depressed patients. Beam mentions hydrotherapy, but really doesn't do any more than skim the surface. I guess I wish the author had been someone with some background in mental health. As an aside, I thought it was interesting that the subtitle of the paperback ("Life and Death Inside America's Premier Mental Hospital") is different from that of the hardcover version ("The Rise and Fall of America's Premier Mental Hospital"). I remember when the book first came out that McLean administrators were unhappy with the hardcover title since it suggested that McLean was on the decline. Why would Beam have changed the name? I tend to think that the reasons had to do with selling more copies of his book rather than with any change of opinion on his part. If that is the case, then Beam is more than just a superficial writer, he is also a sell-out.
Rating: 4
Summary: Mentally challenging, and Mentally Mentally Straining
Comment: My brain strains, mostly in the rain, when I read about the insane. I liked this book because it mirrors my life in so many ways, mostly in the way that it is boring, and dry.
Rating: 3
Summary: Esoterica for a niche market
Comment: GRACEFULLY INSANE is advertised as a narrative description of life inside McLean Hospital, "America's premier mental hospital". More accurately, perhaps, the volume is a superficial history of psychiatric care in the United States, or at least as practiced in the Boston area, using McLean as a backdrop.
Mental health care has come a long way from less enlightened times when, according to author Alex Beam, terrorizing patients into wellness was considered effective:
"One German asylum lowered patients into a dungeon filled with snakes." (My mother, a psychiatrist, once told me about a patient of hers who saw pink snakes on the ceiling. Hmmm, I wonder where Mom did her residency.)
The narrative is at its best when describing the evolution of 19th and 20th century methods of therapy: cold water dunking, bath treatments (hot air, electric light, vapor, salt, sitz, loofah), insulin coma, electroshock, metrazole shock, lobotomy, Freudian analysis, and psychopharmacology. Unfortunately, the author fleshes out the text by describing the experiences of specifically named individuals undergoing such cures, usually at McLean. It was then that my eyes began to glaze over and GRACEFULLY INSANE becomes almost a work of local interest since most of the inmates came from Boston's social upper crust, which regarded the hospital as a handy dumping ground for mentally challenged and inconvenient family members.
I was briefly re-invigorated when a 1948 sex scandal involving McLean's psychiatrist-in-chief and a nurse got the pair prosecuted on a Morals Charge (Oh, puhleeze!). And later in the 60s and 70s, when the badly behaved teenage children of the local gentry, relegated to the institution by clueless parents for too much drugs, sex, and rock 'n' roll, upset the traditionally genteel environment.
While mildly entertaining and reasonably informative, GRACEFULLY INSANE came across as too much of a niche market product, appealing perhaps mostly to mental health professionals, residents of Boston and its environs, and fans of certain famous and terminally dysfunctional (i.e. suicidal) poets of New England heritage. I don't fall into any of these categories, though I'm now sufficiently interested to purchase THE BELL JAR and MOUNT MISERY, the former by Sylvia Plath based on her sojourn at McLean, and the latter by Dr. Stephen Bergman (pen name Samuel Shem) based on his medical residency there.
I'll give GRACEFULLY INSANE to my Mom. She can remember the Good Ol' Days of electroshock fondly.
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Title: Mad In America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and The Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill by Robert Whitaker ISBN: 0738207993 Publisher: Perseus Publishing Pub. Date: 15 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $17.50 |
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Title: Bedlam: A Year in the Life of a Mental Hospital by Dominick Bosco ISBN: 1559721138 Publisher: Birch Lane Pub. Date: May, 1992 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Madness: A Brief History by Roy Porter ISBN: 0192802674 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: April, 2003 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: The Invisible Plague: The Rise of mental Illness from 1750 to the Present by E. Fuller Torrey, Judy Miller ISBN: 0813530032 Publisher: Rutgers University Press Pub. Date: 10 January, 2002 List Price(USD): $28.00 |
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Title: Asylums : Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates by Erving Goffman ISBN: 0385000162 Publisher: Anchor Pub. Date: 18 October, 1961 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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