by Alex Beam
Then Warner Brothers signs him up, and it’s time to go to New York and make a record. I’m seventeen and living at home—I really couldn’t go with him. At that age, being in New York and depending on him ... I just knew I couldn’t depend on him.
Van Morrison’s train left the station, and John Sheldon was not on it. The ethereal, acoustic album that Morrison cut for Warner Brothers turned out to be Astral Weeks, which some cognoscenti insist is one of the greatest rock records of all time. As it happened, McLean was represented on the album. The haunting flute solos that backstop songs like “Cyprus Avenue” and “Madame George” were provided by John Payne, a talented Harvard musician who interrupted his undergraduate studies to obtain a McLean “degree.” As one doctor explained to me, with a knowing smile, “Music therapy at McLean was the path to greatness.”
Most of the young people who fetched up at McLean hailed from the social elite: Payne was a cousin of Robert Lowell; Isaac Taylor was a well-to-do doctor who worked for a time as dean of the medical school at the University of North Carolina. The son of John Marquand, at the time one of America’s best-known novelists, was at McLean, as was the daughter of the legendary cartoonist Al Capp. Peppered elsewhere on the wards were Yankee Forbeses, a department store heiress, a Mafia don-in-waiting, and so on. “It was the great Cambridge sociology experiment,” remarks Susanna Kaysen, author of the McLean memoir Girl, Interrupted, by which she means the warehousing of the troubled children of the well-to-do. Kaysen’s own father was running Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study when she was hospitalized. “The old definition of the Proper Bostonian used to be someone who lived on Beacon Hill and had an uncle in McLean,” Merton Kahne says. “As the clientele got younger, I used to joke that we were redefining the Proper Bostonian. Now it was someone at McLean who had an uncle on Beacon Hill.”
The McLean youth movement was a response to what an economist might call a market opportunity. Psychiatry was a booming field, flush with confidence in its therapeutic powers. Doctors were pouring out of the medical schools and were looking for patients to analyze. Many insurance companies were paying for up to six months of inpatient care, and the field of adolescent psychiatry was burgeoning. And there was no shortage of troubled young people. The 1960s need no introduction here: Drugs, rebelliousness, and rejection of parental authority were the order of the day, especially in the socioeconomic strata that had access to psychiatric care. (In her official history of the hospital, Silvia Sutton remarks that “delinquent adolescents from less-advantaged homes had other destinies, such as reform school.”) Conveniently, doctors developed a catchall diagnosis for their teenage clientele: “adolescent turmoil.” “These were people who probably wouldn’t be considered severe enough to be hospitalized now,” says Dr. Michael Sperber, who worked on South Belknap and Bowditch during the 1960s. “Their curse was that somebody had some money in the family. It wasn’t like managed care is today. There was a lot of money around, and as long as people had a bank account, you’d find something that they should work on.”
Barbara Schwartz, a social worker who started at McLean in 1962, remembers that the young people began to invade the hospital in the early 1960s, at the end of the Stanton era, even before the well-documented scourges of drugs, sex, and rock and roll:The parents were in great distress. They had lost control. The kids were running away, doing all kinds of things. Now I shudder when I think of who was hospitalized. It was a difficult group because we didn’t know what we were doing. I mean, we thought we did. If I only knew then what I know now, some of those kids would never have been admitted to that hospital, they would never have had to go through that kind of an experience. It saddens me. It was a shame.
Not surprisingly, there was no small amount of cynicism among the young people concerning the hospital’s motivations. I interviewed a successful forty-something media executive in lower Manhattan who was still bristling with anger, both at his father for sending him to McLean and at the hospital for diagnosing him with an unspecified “character disorder.” He showed me a photograph of himself in a football uniform and with long hair. “I was a hippie,” he remembered.
I hated jocks, and I didn’t fit into any group. I hated most drugs—except for pot—but that didn’t matter, because there wasn’t any distinction between someone who used marijuana and someone who used heroin. As far as they were concerned, you were in the “drug culture.” I refused to cut my hair, and I could have stopped smoking pot at any time. To have a hospital say I had a character disorder was a complete scam. McLean was scandalous to me. I don’t think anyone ever spent the night there and didn’t get diagnosed with a character disorder.
When she retrieved her McLean file to write Girl, Interrupted, Susanna Kaysen noticed that her diagnosis was “borderline personality disorder” (BPD), another controversial catchall, popularized and promoted by McLean’s own John Gunderson, the same doctor who managed the decade-long schizophrenia study for Alfred Stanton in the 1960s.22 To this day, Kaysen, like many members of the psychiatric profession, is not exactly sure what her diagnosis meant: “BPD—a psychiatrist once told me that’s what they call people whose lifestyles they don’t like.” John Sheldon also managed to see his case file. “If you look at my notes, it just said ‘adolescent turmoil.’ It’s not even clearly diagnosed. The thinking was, ‘This guy’s having a tough adolescence. Let’s lock him up so he doesn’t hurt himself.’”
The McLean party line, articulated to me in an interview by Shervert Frazier, the cerebral Texas doctor who ascended to the post of psychiatrist-in-chief in 1972, was that the kids were on drugs. Sitting in Frazier’s well-appointed office, decorated with an old-fashioned painting of a sailing ship on the wall, I could not help feeling that I was talking to one of my own parents or to one of any of my generation’s parents, indeed, of every generation’s parents: well-meaning, avuncular, out of touch. At age seventynine, Frazier has kept himself in marvelous shape; he swims and lifts weights, and I first met him hiking the antique, oak-paneled corridors of the administration building during the ten-minute breaks between his therapeutic appointments. His speech, for all its fineries of thought, still twangs of the Lone Star State. He speaks in clear paragraphs; indeed, when he later lost his job in a plagiarism scandal, his defenders suggested that his habit of dictating finished journal copy probably did him in, so adept was he at assimilating materials that he had read or heard, that his brain never processed their provenance. So here is Frazier, McLean’s psychiatrist-in-chief for twelve years, on the subject of his rambunctious, youthful charges:These young people were usually from well to do families who wanted another opinion about what was going on with their children. Mainly, the families didn’t know how many drugs or what drugs they were using; they just knew there had been a noticeable change in personality, and they wanted to know what caused the change in personality and what could we do about it.
As you know, street drugs were readily available and were cheap at that time, and people were going to India and to ashrams, people were joining politically inspired groups and cults, too. Essentially we had a lot of adolescents around here with forty, sometimes four hundred LSD trips, and a lot of brain damage as a result. We saw use of every kind of drug under the sun—angel dust, LSD, Ecstasy, drugs that been around for years and years and years—plus all the street drugs including marijuana, hashish, cocaine, heroin, which they called “H.” These people were addicted and their behavior while under the influence of drugs was erratic. They were not themselves, and at times they were dangerous to themselves and to others. Their friends didn’t recognize them and vice versa. Many of them had disowned their families. Nobody in the old-line families had ever seen anything like it—all they ever did was drink martinis.
One of Frazier’s contemporaries, Dr. Alan Stone, weighed in along similar lines in a lengthy review of the movie Girl, Interrupted made from Kaysen’s book. Stone was a resident at McLean and later became director of residency training there before defectin
g to Harvard Law School, where he now teaches. He writes of the 1960s kids:These were kids who dropped acid every day and found their own reality; some also did heroin, speed, and barbiturates (cocaine had not yet arrived). Some actually had psychiatric disorders, which they were treating with their own drugs in their own ways. Feeling anxious or lonely—smoke pot. Worried that you’re losing your mind—take acid and see how far you can go. But most troubling to their parents were the self-destructive behaviors, not just having casual sex with strangers but burning themselves with cigarettes, cutting their arms with razors, making their own primitive tattoos, and worse. One psychiatric pundit said that “hippiephrenia” was replacing schizophrenia.
They looked and acted crazy by conventional standards but they did not fit into any of our diagnostic categories. We eventually had to create a new diagnosis for patients like Kaysen: Borderline Personality Disorder. It was by no means easy for us to decide when someone had crossed the border from hippie to hippiephrenia.
The records of the time are full of the kind of well-intentioned floundering that has always characterized the older generation’s attempts to understand their children. One former administrator gave me a copy of a 1968 panel presentation entitled “An Adolescent Program Needed.” It amounts to fifty pages of hand-wringing on the part of top doctors and the teachers at the Arlington School about the obvious successes the boys and girls were enjoying in their ongoing battles with authority. The all-important therapy sessions were used as excuses for blowing off classes and exams, and students lied to their doctors about their school commitments. During the panel discussion, the director of the Arlington School laments that four students wangled a half-day pass into Cambridge to see the Beatles movie Yellow Submarine by informing their ward administrator that school ended at noon that day. In fact, an important chemistry exam had been scheduled. During the same year, administrators convened a “Youth Forum,” summoning adolescent patients to the coffee shop to vent their concerns about life in the hospital. The meetings, which were held weekly for several months, were predictably chaotic. The young people wanted “more freedom” but had no idea how to get it. The doctors encouraged them to take various initiatives, but this was, after all, a mental hospital, not a Marine Corps barracks. The most vociferous complainers rarely attended two meetings in a row; invitations to certain doctors were never written; the patients bemoaned their sense of helplessness. When the administrators fretted that the young patients did not participate in hospital outings, they heard the obvious feedback: We don’t want to go to Crane’s Beach or to the Museum of Fine Arts or to Fenway Park. “The trouble with hospital trips is that they aren’t of interest to the younger people,” one patient said. “I bet if you had a trip to the Jimi Hendrix concert, you’d have fifty or sixty patients showing up.”
It is easy sport, poking fun at overcredentialed authority figures who have to coin nonsense words like “hippiephrenia” to describe young people’s psychological disturbances. But if doctors like Frazier and Stone wax pompous and uninformed about the children of the 1960s, then where does the truth lie? Certainly a huge percentage of the hospitalized youngsters experimented with some drugs; they were hardly alone. But only a tiny fraction of young people ended up in mental hospitals. So if drugs did not cause mental disturbances, what did? Or if heavy drug use testified to some deeper anxiety, what was it? Peter Storkerson, a man now in his late forties who spent eight months in McLean in 1967, thought the problems began when the younger generation failed to live up to the expectations of what is now portentously called the Greatest Generation. His own father played football in college with the legendary Knute Rockne and ran a successful high-tech business that employed 1,500 people. Six feet tall, Peter is thinboned and slight. “My father was the model I was given, one I had no way of fulfilling. In my family, you grew up with a certain set of expectations about how you are going to perform, how you are going to succeed, and if it doesn’t happen to be appropriate, you have no real alternatives.” Barbara Schwartz was Susanna Kaysen’s social worker, and she remembers the family’s disenchantment with their daughter’s life choices: “Her father had wanted her hospitalized because she was a stubborn child. She didn’t want to go to college. That was anathema to him. He couldn’t tolerate that. After all, he was at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton. So there must be something wrong with her head for her not to want to go to college.” A man whose first three names are Pierrepont Edward Stuyvesant used words like Storkerson’s to describe the anguish felt by the children of the aristocracy, many of whom landed in McLean. This man’s father had never worked, inhabited a huge seaside manor, and confiscated Roosevelt dimes from his son, so much did he hate the “socialist” depredations of the New Deal. “The sons and daughters of the old families couldn’t commiserate with anyone,” Pierrepont told me. “They had their own confusions and incoherence but the parents wouldn’t speak to them about it. There was this terrific need to talk about it.”
If the kids were not sick in the conventional sense, then one has to ask: How were they treated, and more important, how could they show evidence of being “cured” and get out? The treatment had not changed much over the years, although of course the young people were not subjected to Scotch douches, insulin therapy, or electroshock. Many of them were still medicated with Thorazine, the powerful antipsychotic drug left over from the 1950s. The drug effectively sedated even the most hyperactive teenager and generated bizarre side effects, such as the aimless “Thorazine shuffle,” an occasionally lolling tongue, and the “Thorazine tan.” (The drug heightens the skin’s sensitivity to the sun, so on their occasional outings to the beach or the New Hampshire woods, the boys and girls had to be extra careful to wear long-sleeve shirts and pants to avoid quickly baking to a golden ochre.) “It’s really a heavy and stultifying tranquilizer,” James Taylor recalls. “It’s a blunt instrument, and a very heavy-handed way of dealing with mental health problems. It felt like someone had cast my head in concrete.”
But the primary course of therapy remained the hour or hours of talk psychotherapy, and milieu therapy, referring to the generally supportive caregivers, the gorgeous grounds, and the absence of siblings and parents, who were sometimes assigned the fashionable term “schizophrenogenic.” Of course, milieu therapy cut both ways. Many socially maladapted troublemakers suddenly found themselves in the company of other troublemakers, and antisocial behavior was reinforced. In some respects, life on the inside was not so different from life on the outside. As in every college dorm, the KLH stereo was the centerpiece furnishing for each room, and drugs—the supposed root of all psychological evil—were available. Rob Perkins remembers blasting the Chambers’ Brothers raucous anthem “Time Has Come Today” (“Time has come today / Young hearts can go their way.... / I don’t care what others say / They say we don’t listen anyway”) at top volume with friends of his inside a locked room on Bowditch until aides came and broke the door down. The perpetrators would lose their stereos, their albums, and all privileges. One after another, they regained their possessions and their freedoms—and then pulled the same stunt all over again.
Some of the Arlington School students were outpatients and went home at night and brought dope back into the hospital; some of the ward aides shared their stashes. Subjected to frequent checks, the patients evolved ever more inventive hiding places: a toothpaste tube; a hole in a windowsill; under the pin of the ninth golf hole, which sat smack in front of the administration building. “There was this real country club aspect to the whole place,” John Sheldon told me.
You could hide anything, you could get anything, somebody was always going into town and coming back with something. McLean was the first place I ever got marijuana. The first night I was there, I was in the bathroom and this guy came in and said, “How cool are you?” I said, “What are you talking about?” And he said, “You want to get stoned?” So that’s when I started smoking pot! Isn’t it a riot? I don’t know whether to laugh or cry
, when I think about it.
Once someone was in, the key question became how to get out. In theory, one could just walk out, the way James Taylor did. But with no money and no support system, there was nowhere to go. Most families would accept their children back into the fold only after they had been “cured” by McLean, that is, formally discharged into a halfway house or back to their homes. Peter Storkerson got out because after six months he still had not been assigned a psychotherapist. “I told them ‘This is my money, I’m here voluntarily, you haven’t done anything for me, I’m gone.’” For John Sheldon, it took somewhat longer to arrive at a similar realization:They’re not going to let you out of there until you do what they want. You know you’re not crazy but you have to figure out what they want. ... First of all, you figure out that your parents aren’t going to come get you, and then you get really angry, because you’re left there with these lunatics. You’re just really, really pissed—and that’s why they don’t let you out! So you start finding other people who are pissed, and hang around with them. You look for people who are intelligent, who are rebellious and pissed off, who at least have a sense of humor. ... a lot of them are substance-abuse people, like alcoholics, because they’re all smarter, believe it or not, and they’re funnier, they’re more intelligent. I think they’re so smart and they see through things so clearly that they have to take something to blot it out.
