Gracefully Insane

Life and Death Inside America’s Premier Mental Hospital

By: Alex Beam

Narrated by: Matthew Josdal

Its landscaped ground, chosen by Frederick Law Olmsted and dotted with Tudor mansions, could belong to a 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.

In its "golden age", McLean provided as genteel an environment for the treatment of mental illness as one could imagine. But the golden age is over, and a downsized, downscale McLean - despite its affiliation with Harvard University - is struggling to stay afloat. Gracefully Insane, by Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam, is a fascinating and emotional biography of McLean Hospital from its founding in 1817 through today. It is filled with stories about patients and doctors: the Ralph Waldo Emerson protégé whose brilliance disappeared along with his madness; Anne Sexton's poetry seminar, and many more.

The story of McLean is also the story of the hopes and failures of psychology and psychotherapy; of the evolution of attitudes about mental illness, of approaches to treatment, and of the economic pressures that are making McLean - and other institutions like it - relics of a bygone age.

©2001 Alex Beam (P)2021 Tantor

It was presented kind of boring

Made me role my eyes it was so boring. But then there were parts of the actual story that made me listen harder.Annoying narrator voice.

this was informative and interesting

this was like a walk through history. a walk through a time you hope will never be repeated and yet it's entirely possible! I love hearing true stories of people's lives good or bad. so this was very interesting to me.

So dull. Not what I expected.

It's like listening to a history text book. That's fine if you enjoy that kind of thing, but I was hoping for more about individual patient experiences, not the history and genealogy of each patient's family.