Rating: 
Summary: A Great Read by a Fine Writer
Review: "Gracefully Insane" by Alex Beam is a terrific book that explores - with a bit of detached bemusement - the history of McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. McLean has a reputation as an important Harvard teaching hospital that pioneered many recent developments in the treatment of mental illness with prescription drugs. It also has a reputation as the preferred institution of the rich and famous. This latter aspect is the focus of Beam's book, although the author is evenhanded in respecting both the hospital's achievements and the plight of the mentally ill.First of all, Alex Beam is a fine writer. Spend a little time just enjoying the skill of someone who knows how to put one word after another. Second, he's on to something unusual with his narrative. The intersection of celebrities such as Ray Charles, James Taylor, and several troubled poets, not to mention wealthy murderers with the wherewithal to trade up from a prison sentence to a comfortable stay in McLean, provides many opportunities for rich anecdotes and behind-the-scenes views of a way of life that usually is kept well off stage. There is a lot about the social scene that is uniquely Boston, and Bostonians certainly will enjoy that aspect of the book. But you don't have to be from the Hub to enjoy this unique and fascinating story.
Rating:
Summary: History of the Most Famous Mental Institution---well Bellvue
Review: Alex Beam is a reporter/columnist for the Boston Globe. In this remarkable book he recounts the history of McLean's Hospital in Belmont, which covers history of treatments, grounds, theory and perceptions. McLean's is/was an incredible place. In it's hayday its exterrior was set up like a country club, pools, tennis courts, while the treatment du jour was brain surgery (lobotomy) and electric shock therapy. It explores the "we're the experts and you're not" mentallity of psychiatrists which still occurs. It also recalls how it was the Betty Ford of mental health in-patient centers. The hospital served people such as James Taylor, Sylvia Plath, and Susanna Kaysen. Although mentioned in a chapter, the focus of this book is not just this. Interesting to know that poetry groups and groups for the arts are still occurring on-site. This book is a complete account of the exterrior and interrior workings of McLeans. Even today, if you walk the grounds, it feels like you're walking a college campus. The place is green, and beautiful. Beam's words and wit, his historic sense, his story telling, and his focus on detail is all encompassing. This book is wonderful and fascinating.
Rating:
Summary: History of the Most Famous Mental Institution---well Bellvue
Review: Alex Beam is a reporter/columnist for the Boston Globe. In this remarkable book he recounts the history of McLean's Hospital in Belmont, which covers history of treatments, grounds, theory and perceptions. McLean's is/was an incredible place. In it's hayday its exterrior was set up like a country club, pools, tennis courts, while the treatment du jour was brain surgery (lobotomy) and electric shock therapy. It explores the "we're the experts and you're not" mentallity of psychiatrists which still occurs. It also recalls how it was the Betty Ford of mental health in-patient centers. The hospital served people such as James Taylor, Sylvia Plath, and Susanna Kaysen. Although mentioned in a chapter, the focus of this book is not just this. Interesting to know that poetry groups and groups for the arts are still occurring on-site. This book is a complete account of the exterrior and interrior workings of McLeans. Even today, if you walk the grounds, it feels like you're walking a college campus. The place is green, and beautiful. Beam's words and wit, his historic sense, his story telling, and his focus on detail is all encompassing. This book is wonderful and fascinating.
Rating: 
Summary: Rich in Anecdotal History
Review: Beam's "Gracefully Insane" is rich in anecdotal history, but poor in other areas. Makes for a light, enjoyable read, but Beam rarely teases out the interesting insights that arise from his excellent access to the inner workings of America's "Premier" mental hospital. This book will make you think about the (troubled) history of psychiatry/ treatment of mental illness, and Beam's portrait of this institution caused me to shed no tears for the fall of this fabled refuge for blue blooded loons. Reading interviews with "graduates", its hard not to question the assumptions that underlied McLean's very reasons for existence. Few of the individuals profiled within seem like they were ever a "danger to self or others". Indeed, when a rash of suicides hit McLean a couple of decades ago, the staff were singularly unprepared to cope. Perhaps this is because the "inmates" were not as bad off as one might suppose? Makes an interesting companion piece for Goffman's "Asylums".
Rating:
Summary: Rich in Anecdotal History
Review: Beam's "Gracefully Insane" is rich in anecdotal history, but poor in other areas. Makes for a light, enjoyable read, but Beam rarely teases out the interesting insights that arise from his excellent access to the inner workings of America's "Premier" mental hospital. This book will make you think about the (troubled) history of psychiatry/ treatment of mental illness, and Beam's portrait of this institution caused me to shed no tears for the fall of this fabled refuge for blue blooded loons. Reading interviews with "graduates", its hard not to question the assumptions that underlied McLean's very reasons for existence. Few of the individuals profiled within seem like they were ever a "danger to self or others". Indeed, when a rash of suicides hit McLean a couple of decades ago, the staff were singularly unprepared to cope. Perhaps this is because the "inmates" were not as bad off as one might suppose? Makes an interesting companion piece for Goffman's "Asylums".
Rating: 
Summary: Nervous Breakdowns of the Rich and Famous
Review: By the time McLean Hospital opened its doors in the mid-19th century, mental illness had been treated by various methods: lowering the patient into a dungeon filled with snakes, pelting him with vigorous spouts of cold water, inducing vomiting, draining great quantities of blood, spinning him on a rotating board, dosing him with opium and hashish, and soaking him in a warm, electrified bath. Founded at the dawn of the Freudian age, McLean offered something revolutionary: fresh-baked rolls and art lessons, therapy by landscaping. Alex Beam gives us a fascinating tour of the next century in what one doctor bemoaned as the "medical playground" of psychiatry. On the manicured campus in Belmont, doctors adopted and then rejected lobotomy, adopted and rejected Freudian analysis, and were finally drawn with all their profession in the direction of psychopharmacology. Anne Sexton taught poetry there before her own suicide, and Sylvia Plath and Susanna Kaysen emerged with syllabus-ready memoirs, and one patient of Freud's greeted doctors every morning by saying "I am my father's penis." Beam is a skeptical inquirer, and his book may ruffle the feathers of local psychiatrists. (Has ruffled, actually.) But for ordinary readers, he does what few writers have done -- tell with humor and intelligence the story of doctors and patients groping through suffering and toward some kind of answer.
Rating:
Summary: Esoterica for a niche market
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Unbalanced
Review: I was disappointed in this book, especially after all the good reviews. The book is heavy on gossip, real estate issues and miscellaneous information. It is annoying that the author belittles psychiatry since it is apparent that he lacks a knowledge and understanding of it. He also seems to be negative about McLean at any point in its history and that just doesn't fit with the facts. I was hoping for a more balanced, good story. Instead, I felt that I had read a book by a person prejudiced about its subject, selective about the facts and lacking in analysis.
Rating:
Summary: Great history of a field and an institution
Review: Like others, I found this satisfying on several levels. Beam does a commendable job of reviewing the history of psychiatry since the early 19th century and appropriately noting the disappointing outcomes, including the limitations of contemporary biological and psychological treatments. He also provides an engrossing history of one of America's most famous psychiatric facilities, including the perspectives of living ex-patients and staff. The book works better on both levels than another recent account of American psychiary, T.M. Luhrmann's turgid and pretentious "Of Two Minds".
Rating:
Summary: Good Doctors/Good Creature Comforts=Acceptance
Review: Not only is Gracefully Insane a history of McLean Hospital, but also a history of psychology and mental illness treatments of the last two hundred years. Included throughout the book are stories of famous and not-so-famous people who received treatment at this historic mental institution. A columnist for the Boston Globe, Alex Beam interviewed many people to get a comprehensive look at what living and working at McLean was like. Currently the hospital has been in a bit of money trouble and the grounds and some of its buildings are being sold off to raise money to keep McLean going in some capacity. The book reveals the opulent history of these buildings and the lavish lifestyle that some families with money would house their loved ones in. Gracefully Insane is extremely interesting and fact filled and honest about the history of mental illness and the hospital that housed so many.
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