Gracefully Insane
Page 27
Scandals, at McLean Hospital
Schizophrenia
and Danish twins study
vs. hippiephrenia
“Schizophrenics Can Recover” (Stanton)
Schizophrenogenic
Schnitzler, Arthur
Schrafft family
Schreiber, Judge
Schwartz, Barbara
Schwartz, Morris
Scofield, Edward
Scotch douches
Scribonius Largus
Sculptured landscape, curative power of
Seidel, Frederick
Selkirk, Alexander
Semrad, Elvin
Sex, and adolescent psychiatry
Sexton, Anne
Sexual harassment scandal
Sharpe, Douglas
Shaw, Louis Agassiz
Shaw, Parkman “Parky,”
Shaw, Roberta
Shaw, Robert Gould
Shaw, Robert Gould
Shaw family
Shein, Harvey
Shein, Mrs.
Sheldon, John
Sheldon, William
Shem, Samuel. See Bergman, Stephen
Shepherd Pratt
Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge (architects)
Shine, William
Shock therapies. See also individual therapies
Shorter, Edward
Shurcliff, Sidney Nichols
Signac, Paul
Silver Hill
Silverman, Samuel
Simon, Linda
Sister Kate’s Soul Stew and Submarine Sandwich Shoppe (band)
Skiing expeditions
Sleep therapy
Slocum, Jonathan
Smith, Sally Bedell
Smith College
and Plath, Sylvia
The Snake Pit
Somerville Asylum
South Belknap Hall
Sperber, Michael
Springsteen, Bruce
St. Elizabeth’s Hospital
St. Mark’s School
St. Regis hotel
Stanford University Medical School
Stanley R. McCormick Hall
Stanton, Alfred
and Barnhouse, Ruth Tiffany
and modern psychiatry
portrait of
and research
and suicide wave
Stanton, Bruce
Stanton, Harriet
Stanton Lecture
State Department of Mental Health
Stein, Gertrude
Stern, Daniel
Stieglitz, Leopold
Stigmatization
Stiver, Irene
Stone, Alan
Storkerson, Peter
Strawberry Discharge
Street drugs. See also individual drugs
Stuart, Gilbert
Stuart, Sarah Payne
Submarine Sandwich Shoppe
Sugarman Funeral Home
Suicide
and Prozac
See also Psychiatric suicide; Suicide wave
Suicide wave. See also Psychiatric suicide; Suicide
Sullivan, Harry Stack
Summer camp
Sutton, Silvia
Swan, John
Sweeney, Agnes
Syphilis
Talbott, John
Talking to Angels (Perkins)
Talk therapy. See also Psychotherapy
Tannen, Julius
Tartakoff, Helen
“Tavistock, June,”
Taylor, Isaac
Taylor, James
Taylor, Kate
Taylor, Livingston
Teicher, Martin
Tennis
Testicles, ultraviolet irradiation of
Thayer, Elaine Orr
Thayer, Nancy
Thayer, Scofield
Therapy
and poetry. See Poetry therapy
Therapy, music. See Music therapy
Therm-O-Rite Products Company
Thomas, Jack
Thomson, Captane
Thorazine
and Plath, Sylvia
Thornton, Peter
Tillotson, Kenneth
Tillotson, Mrs.
“Time Has Come Today,”
Time magazine
To Bedlam and Part Way Back (Sexton)
Tonic baths
Tooth extraction
Topectomy
Total push experiment
Tranquilizer, the
Trees, at McLean Hospital
“The Trees of McLean,”
Tuesdays with Morrie
Tuke, William
Tunney, Gene
Tunney, John
Tuttle, George
Typhoid vaccine therapy
Uline Ice Company
Ultraviolet irradiation, of testicles
Under Observation (Vuckovic and Berger)
University of North Carolina Medical School
University of Texas Tower
University of Vienna
Upham, Appleton, and Company
Upham, George Phineas, Jr. (son)
Upham, George Phineas (father)
Upham Hall
and adolescent treatment center
architecture
and Charles, Ray
closing of
and Everett, Frank
and Shaw, Louis Agassiz
and Wilkinson, Joan Tunney
and Ziegel brothers
U. S. News & World Report
Valenstein, Elliot
Valley Head Hospital
Vapor bath
The Varieties of Religious Experience (William James)
Vaux, Calvert. See also Olmsted-Vaux design
Veblen, Thorstein
Venesection
Very, Jones
Veterans Administration hospital (Boston)
Veterans Administration hospitals
Visiting Committee
Voltaire
Vomiting, induced
Vuckovic, Alexander
“Waking in the Blue” (Robert Lowell)
Wakoski, Diane
Warburg family
Warner, Silas
Warner Brothers
War of 1812,
Warren, John Collins (father)
Warren, John (son)
Warren, Mason
Washburn, Stephen
The Waste Land (T. S. Eliot)
Water treatments. See also Hydrotherapy
Watkins Sanitarium
Watson, James Sibley
Watts, James. See also Freeman, Walter Jackson
The Way
Webster, Daniel
Wells, F. Lyman
Westwood Lodge
Wet mitt friction
Wet sheets
Whitman, Charles
Wilkinson, Joan Tunney
Willard, Dr.
Williams, C. K.
Williams, Harold
Williams, Vernon
Winslow family
Wittgenstein
Wolfe, Richard
Women, and lobotomies
Women’s Division
Wood, Franklin
“Woody Allen syndrome,”
Worcester State Asylum
Working farm
Work-ups
World War II,
“Worthington, Sarah,”
Wyman, Morrill
Wyman, Rufus
Wyman Hall
Wyzanski, Charles
Yale alumni magazine
Yale-New Haven Hospital
Yale University
and constitutional medicine
Yale Younger Poets Award
Yellow Submarine
York Retreat
“Youth Forum,”
Yudowitz, Bernard
Zander machine
Ziegel, Henry
Ziegel, William
Zoo, the, (band)
PublicAffairs is a publishing house founded in 1997. It is a tribute to the standards, values, and flair of three person
s who have served as mentors to countless reporters, writers, editors, and book people of all kinds, including me.
I.F. STONE, proprietor of I. F. Stone’s Weekly, combined a commitment to the First Amendment with entrepreneurial zeal and reporting skill and became one of the great independent journalists in American history. At the age of eighty, Izzy published The Trial of Socrates, which was a national bestseller. He wrote the book after he taught himself ancient Greek.
BENJAMIN C. BRADLEE was for nearly thirty years the charismatic editorial leader of The Washington Post. It was Ben who gave the Post the range and courage to pursue such historic issues as Watergate. He supported his reporters with a tenacity that made them fearless and it is no accident that so many became authors of influential, best-selling books.
ROBERT L. BERNSTEIN, the chief executive of Random House for more than a quarter century, guided one of the nation’s premier publishing houses. Bob was personally responsible for many books of political dissent and argument that challenged tyranny around the globe. He is also the founder and longtime chair of Human Rights Watch, one of the most respected human rights organizations in the world.
For fifty years, the banner of Public Affairs Press was carried by its owner Morris B. Schnapper, who published Gandhi, Nasser, Toynbee, Truman, and about 1,500 other authors. In 1983, Schnapper was described by The Washington Post as “a redoubtable gadfly.” His legacy will endure in the books to come.
Peter Osnos, Founder and Editor-at-Large
1 I found the following entry in the August 15, 1960, edition of the patient-edited newsletter, “Around and About McLean”: “There’s a real treat in store for us next Tuesday night at the P.A.A. [Patient Activities Association] get-together at 7:30. Miss Joan Baez will entertain, singing ballads and accompanying herself on the guitar. This will be a return engagement for Miss Baez, who has played twice recently at Codman and once before at P.A.A.”
2 McLean’s current literature emphasizes that this isn’t your grandfather’s shock therapy: “Although ECT was introduced in the 1930s, its therapeutic use today is very different from what is portrayed as ‘shock treatment’ in books and films. ECT, in fact, is a safe, effective procedure provided by highly skilled professionals” and so on and so forth.
3 Actually, an excellent copy of the McLean portrait greets visitors when they enter the administration building. A patient attacked and damaged the original in the 1960s; restored, it now hangs in the office of Dr. Bruce Cohen, McLean’s president and psychiatrist-in-chief.
4 Warren was the first doctor to use ether successfully, but he did not discover it. A quarrel over credit for the discovery of ether’s anesthetic properties supposedly sent one of the claimants, Dr. Charles Jackson, to McLean. The story goes as follows: Jackson believed that his former lodger, an entrepreneur named William Morton, had stolen the anesthesia idea from him. Legend has it that when Jackson happened across Morton’s gravestone in Mount Auburn Cemetery and saw him credited as the “inventor and revealer” of anesthesia, he suffered a mental breakdown and was sent to McLean. “Jackson’s face no longer looked human, and the cries he uttered were unlike human cries,” one writer recounted. “The creature that cried and thrashed with its limbs in Mount Auburn Cemetery was unchained madness.” Actor Julius Tannen (continued from page 38) depicted Jackson dancing maniacally on Morton’s grave in the 1944 movie account of the ether controversy, The Great Moment. Because anesthesia was one of the world’s most important medical discoveries, the ether wars rage on. Two medical historians, Dr. Richard Patterson and Richard Wolfe, now argue that Jackson was unfairly denied credit for pioneering the use of ether as anesthesia and that it was Morton’s supporters who spread false accounts of Jackson’s dipsomania and lunacy. In the twentieth century, Jackson’s family jawboned McLean’s Franklin Wood into furnishing them with a summary of their forebear’s medical record. (Jackson had conducted some ether experiments at McLean to see if the gas calmed severely disturbed patients. Those experiments failed, but after his breakdown, the grateful trustees allowed him to live as a “guest” at the asylum for seven years until his death in 1880.) Even though Jackson’s death certificate cited the cause of death as “insanity,” Wood reported that Jackson had suffered a stroke, followed by aphasia, causing loss of speech and memory. “There is nothing in this record that would indicate in any way that Dr. Jackson was intemperate in the use of alcohol or that he was a ‘raving maniac,’” Wood wrote.
5 Sheldon lives in the collective memory of medical history as the theoretician of “constitutional medicine,” which argued that physique and posture provided clues to temperament and intelligence. It was thanks to Sheldon that incoming freshmen at Harvard and Yale were photographed nude from the 1940s through the early 1960s, by way of testing his since-discredited hypotheses.
6 Stanley had attempted to unionize the ranch workers on his New Mexico spread, to no avail. The McLean doctors record that “the patient had been so far interested in Socialism as to have given some money, surreptitiously, to the ‘Cause.’”
7 Krafft-Ebing was famous for his textbook Psychopathia Sexualis; both he and the equally prominent Magnan believed that insanity was brought on by hereditary degeneration, a detail probably unknown to Nettie.
8 Riven Rock is the name of a 1998 novel by T. Coraghessan Boyle that dramatizes Stanley’s and Katharine’s plight during his lengthy California exile.
9 In the 1960s, a researcher named Heinrich Landolt also noticed that epilepsy and schizophrenia are reciprocally related, and he floated a theory of “forced normalization,” which holds that epileptics’ mental afflictions lapse during a seizure and reassert themselves when the seizure is being treated. More generally, many schizophrenic patients do become temporarily “clear” when subjected to extreme stress. The classic examples are a medical emergency or a fire on the disturbed ward; patients usually respond to rescuers’ commands. So an induced epileptic seizure, electric shock, or even dunking in frigid water sometimes awakens the responses of “blocked” patients. But the underlying psychiatric disorder almost always reappears in short order.
10 I interviewed a McLean aide who witnessed a mass ECT session at the Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in Morristown, New Jersey. “That was a vivid experience,” he said. “I saw about one hundred patients getting shock therapy in a huge room. They were all strapped down, and they were all twitching and jerking. This is the way they did it. I could just feel the electricity going through the air. There was no screaming, no physical agony, just this twitching.”
11 In 1928, Freud described his feelings about psychotic patients in a letter to Istvan Hollos: “I do not like these patients.... I am annoyed with them.... I feel them to be so far distant from me and from everything human. A curious sort of intolerance, which surely makes me unfit to be a psychiatrist.”
12 The Elaine Orr Thayer-E.E. Cummings love-affair-turned-marriage-disaster is one of the great soap-opera love stories of the twentieth century. Scofield lost interest in his beautiful bride within fifteen months of their honeymoon. When they returned to New York, he took up residence in the Benedick, a luxury apartment building for bachelors, and she moved into Washington Square in Greenwich Village. Thayer encouraged Cummings to frequent Elaine and even reimbursed the penurious young poet for expenses incurred while entertaining his wife. The two became lovers, and Elaine became pregnant. Her daughter was born Nancy Thayer but was legally adopted by Cummings when he and Elaine married a few years later.
When Nancy was a young girl, her mother left Cummings for a man she fell in love with during a transatlantic crossing. Cummings was devastated, especially when Elaine insisted that their marriage be annulled to satisfy her new Catholic husband. As a result, Nancy was to know neither of her fathers. Her mother initially told her that Scofield was dead. When Nancy attained her majority, Elaine told her that Scofield was alive but insane. “But you needn’t worry,” Elaine said to Nancy, “it is not hereditary.” The lawyer handling Scofi
eld’s affairs refused to let her visit the man she thought was her father “because you are said to resemble your mother.”
Several years later, Nancy’s mother let slip that she had once been married to Cummings, who had become one of the country’s best-known poets. As if by coincidence, Cummings invited Nancy to visit him and his wife Marion at their farm in New Hampshire. Nancy found him charming and intelligent and allowed herself to wonder how her mother could have broken off relations with this wonderful man. At one point, while sitting for a portrait for Cummings, she thought, “I am falling in love with this man.” Married with two children, Thayer decided to stop seeing the fifty-four-year-old poet. At their final interview, Cummings said, “Did anyone ever tell you I was your father?” The two remained friends until Cummings’s death. Elaine Orr never warmed to the father-and-child reunion. She refused to discuss the paternity question with her daughter: “It was my life, and has nothing whatever to do with you,” she said, adding, “your children will blame you for what you have done.”
As a result of Cummings’s disclosure, Nancy came into an unexpected inheritance. Although she had no claim on Scofield Thayer’s vast art collection, conservatively valued at $10 million when he died, she became the executor of the Cummings estate after her father’s death. And she assisted Richard S. Kennedy with his 1980 biography of Cummings, Dreams in the Mirror, from which this account is taken.
13 Watson was armorer to the stars. He provided E.E. Cummings with a 38-caliber pistol during the dramatic breakup of the Thayer-Cummings marriage. Cummings was threatening a murder-suicide scenario that, happily, never took place.
14 Yet McLean contributed significantly to the psychiatric drug revolution. In 1953, McLean’s Dr. Willis Bower published the results of the first U.S. clinical trial of Thorazine, an antipsychotic drug that had gained widespread acceptance in Europe. Partly on the strength of Bower’s enthusiastic write-up in the New England Journal of Medicine, Thorazine—hailed as a “chemical lobotomy” or “chemical straitjacket”—became the drug of choice in mental hospitals across America.