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Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti, 2005

gracefully insane ~ a review | life & history at Mclean

McClean hospital has long been a place for the elite. Since it’s founding and original location near Charlestown and eventual move to Watertown on the outskirts of Boston, McClean has had a certain panache that other institutions just don’t have, and we are talking here of mental institutions, or perhaps a more polite term, places where people can get some rest from life, take a breather, get the help that they need and set themselves back on track.

Unlike twelve-step programs and the like, McClean is by contrast almost a country club. Yes, certain wards are locked wards, and true enough, when the famous Olmstead designed it, he created myriad underground tunnels so that residents did not travel above ground from building to building, thereby lessening the odds of escape. The tunnels connect almost every building, save for a few, which had remained largely independent.

To have been at McClean is almost a badge of honor, and the new book Graceful Insanity could not be a better title for a book about such a prestigious and almost sought after place. There are people who would do almost anything to get into McClean just to say they have been there or passed through, and while the experience for many was far from fun, it gave them fodder and grist for the mill for years to come.

Famously, Sylvia Plath indelibly etched McClean into our consciousness with her thinly veiled descriptions of it and her electroshock therapy in her book The Bell Jar (published in Britain three months after her death in 1963, Plath had called it her “pot boiler.” It became one of the most well-read and influential books for women of the twentieth century. An ode to depression and to a certain otherness that so many young girls and even women could relate too.

The same was true for poet Anne Sexton who had originally taught poetry at McLean, apparently pestering the administration until she was granted her wish to teach a class and evaluate the work of the residents. Sexton loved the work and while many were skeptical of her motives (was this part of a book deal she was hoping for, some prestige perhaps); she would have her own breakdown and was eventually placed in the very same ward where she had taught. How the mighty fell, and by most accounts, the stunningly beautiful Sexton (who could have, it is said, easily passed for a model), roamed the hallways of her ward in a trance-like state, barely speaking to anybody. True enough, she would go on to write about her experiences at McClean, but there is little doubt that her breakdown and break from reality was real. Like Plath, Sexton needed to be there.

Robert Lowell, a friend of Plath’s and a great admirer (whom she too admired) was also a McClean resident in the earlier days, and while little is known of the actual reasons for Lowell’s stay, one can easily guess they had to do with depression and a general breakdown of sorts – those very things that had brought and would bring some of Boston’s finest Brahmins and others from all areas of the country to McClean.

Physically, the grounds of McClean were beautiful, resembling more an “ivy league campus” than a mental institution. There were rolling hills populated with trees of all sorts. Two apple orchards are on the property, as our trees of almost every kind. There is a dip in the grounds known as The Bowl where residents could ski and get other outdoor exercise, and there were long paths through the woods for inmates with “grounds privileges” -- those who could roam freely, and later, perhaps even leave the grounds and cone and go as they pleased, so long as they abided by the rules and stuck to a certain curfew. One of the most famous illustrations of McClean was drawn by two residents who logged and documented each and every bush and tree and hill on the grounds and drew a detailed and neatly drawn map of the area – which was accurate in every way. The map is still used to this day and I’m told it hangs in the Administration office where patients first go to be admitted and processed.

<>To be sure, McClean for its beauty and glory, remained a mental institution – it was a fact from which you could not get away, and the work that was gone there between doctor and patient was no more or less profound than any other hospital and one might argue, perhaps more profound due to the 2-1 doctor patient ration.

My own experience of McClean dates back to my university years, long ago, when I visited my boyfriend who had a mental break, and was confined against his will for an observatino that would last almost a full year.

“Checks” were performed every five minutes initially – meaning a nurse would knock on the door to see that all was well. There were no-touching or physical contact rules in place, and meds were doled out and had to be taken whether you wanted them or not or even knew what the hell they were. I remember B.’s room – how the pretty trees outside the window were held at a distance by the hard metal grid and bars that prevented one from either smashing or opening it. And once, when we held each other, we were reprimanded and sent to see the head doctor of the ward, a Dr. Schultz, I believe, a kind man with gentle blue eyes, who explained the rules for two people in love. No touching, no kissing, no sex in the room (even with door closed) no sitting on his bed, no hand-holding, and etc. I also remember the odd things, how we had to eat with plastic knives and how B. had to be given a razor to shave and monitored as he did so. How the toilets had no doors and the mirrors were made of ‘shiny metal” so that they could not be shattered and used as a weapon against the self bent on the final exit.

<>That year, I visited B. most every day, weather permitting, and rode the long trolley ride and then made the steep walk up the hill from the street to the rolling grounds of McClean, uphill all the way. It was a part of our lives for and for all of it, I was one of few, besides his father who may have visited a few times, who came to visit at all.

I remember seeing him sad, alone, somehow humbled by the whole experience and thinking at the time what a terrible loss of freedom it would be to be him. More, that he was not yet famous – just another resident – and so his name would not, and did not, go down in history as one of the famed inmates. He lived in Codman One, which, from what I read, has since become a women’s only facility – at the time, it was co-ed, and though I was his serious girlfriend, I knew he was having some sort of relationship and sneaking sex with a girl on the ward who was a pretty late teen, spoiled by her parents, and hateful when I visited. This was the big tip off; this and that she and B. seemed to be chums whenever I arrived, exchanging glances back and forth across the co-ed corridor. I remember at first my jealousy and then I realized how natural the whole thing seemed. How there were things between them no doubt, that I simply could not and would never comprehend. We never spoke of Christine or what happened, yet it was a block between us that was palpable and real. Some things do not need to be spoken to be made real or known.

For months, we held our passion for each other in check; what were the options? No kissing, not even a hug, and so when B. finally got grounds privileges for good behavior and trustworthiness, we practically ran through the cold autumn air and made urgent love amidst a thick stand of pines on a sloping hill. I still remember the sent of autumn in the air, the pine needles; how our bodies crushed them and released their scent when we made love. It became our ritual, our place. A place to return to and after that one tine, we did so each time. It was the love I could give, and if I could not heal his soul, then perhaps I could make love to it, heal him in some way by a laying on of hands, by showing my love, my tenderness. By proving I would always be there. I remember one day, trying to find my way to Codman 1, where he was housed, and lost and apparently quite confused when a young doctor took me to administration, leading me by the arm, making certain that I was not a patient, despite my protestations and telling him that I had come to “see a friend.” There was security, and this alone let one know that this was no ordinary summer home for those who needed a break.

Needless to say, when B. finally did get out of McClean, the relationship between us continued for a brief while – a few months, a half a year, I don’t quite remember. He took a nice and compact apartment near the fens where I stayed more often than not, but in time, I become just a signifier of all that had gone wrong. A memory of McClean and that time in his life and so he soon found his way to some other (I remember her vividly; the complete opposite of me at the time. Slightly overweight, her rimless glasses with rhinestones that spelled her initials in the right corner. How he assured me that nothing was going on, yet I knew… I knew… and soon enough, I would be finding my own way to a breakdown and my world as I knew it came crashing down around me and all that I had believe in for the past three years, had been no more than a grand illusion (a necessary complication of his disorder]

I was told, in a couple’s therapy session with B., that he suffered from – delusions of grandeur, pathological lying, the inability to feel remorse of even true love, except for himself, which he felt deeply). So I learned that this person I loved and had done such a convincing job of mimicking me, turned out to not love me after all. He loved himself, I remember the head doctor telling me. He was, in his words, a true sociopath and narcissist. So why then, was I surprised to learn all that I had been his dupe, his fool, his safety net and nothing more. And yet….

James Taylor and several of his family members also passed through McClean and he wrote great songs about his stay. It seems to be the artistic way – to attend McClean and then write about it, and I’ve often wondered if I could cash in on this deal myself. Perhaps I have, perhaps I am writing that book. Who is to say? Certainly I would not tip my hand. McClean is not a state hospital with a horrid patient. Susanna Kaysen, an excellent writer in my view and many others, also passed through McClean after her own suicide attempt with aspirin and spent a good deal of time at McClean, then writing a highly successful book (Girl Interrupted) about her stay there (which eventually became a film starring Angelina Jolie and Winona Ryder as Kaysen),

There were the ‘lifers’ as they were known; those who had been admitted by their spouses or families years prior and had special privileges. They lived in a separate house, unconnected to the others, and had suites, decorated with their own furniture. They could have real knives and even sharp tools for their art if necessary, and would spend the remainder of their days at McClean. They were the last of a dying breed – quite literally – neatly turned out in their dapper seersuckers and boat hats, roaming the grounds at will.

<>Should they die between 7 p.m and 7 a.m., the nurses were instructed to leave the body as its, to open the window and securely lock the door until the undertaker could come in the morning to remove the body.

There are too many other famous and infamous others to list here of those who passed through the great admissions office of McClean and the resultant art from which they drew on their stay at this place. One could almost argue that McClean is responsible for some of the best poems and literature and artwork around today. Just read Plath’s descriptions of her electroshock therapy and it all becomes clear that this was no picnic – not below the surface anyway.

McClean was and is a place of healing yes, but also a place of great sorrow. To visit is to see its obvious New England beauty (especially on an Autumn or Spring day), but also to feel the deep sorrow and sadness that is so pervasive there; the utter sense of hopelessness held by some of the patients, so lost in their own mind, depressions, delusions, and other dis-ease.

Graceful Insanity is not only choc full of interesting historical tid-bits, but it is a great part of not only Boston history, but American history and our constant strive to find, as Carl Elliott wrote more recently, our “authentic self.” It is the quest for who we are, what we want. It is our signpost in the night pointing the way, and try as they may, there is nowhere quite like it.

To stay at McClean, is to be forever changed. To know the horrors of any mental institution and the seemingly barbaric methods (electroshock, ice-cold hydrotherapy, insulin therapy and various drug therapies and cocktails, padded rooms (literally) for “time outs” and full, spread eagle restraints that would humiliate just about anyone – applied sometimes to women by half-naked women dressed only in brief hospital gowns, no way to cover up or show any modesty. McClean may build you up, but in the process it will strip you bare and reduce you to how you merit being treated or what the doctor or nurses feel appropriate.

This is recommended reading for anyone interested in institutions, history, self help, and brings to mind the work of Kay Redfield Jamison, Alix Kates Schulman, of course, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and other famed poets and writers. It is elegantly written with an excellent background of the place and plates of illustration that depict life at McClean as it was and is.

In short, this is a book that though not obvious perhaps, is not to be missed. I expect it will do down as the authoritative book about such a place and will let us in to a world that otherwise, has remained somewhat of a mystery, seen only through the eyes of patients.

sadi ranson-polizzotti
www.tantmieux.squarespace.com

this article first appeared on www.blogcritics.org