Gracefully Insane (30 page)

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.

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:

It was all quite simple, in the end. Figure out what society deems to be sane behavior and copy it. You act like you are getting better, and you will get better. And eventually you will grow up.

When I began researching this book, I befriended “June Tavistock,” a
woman my age who had spent some time at McLean. June was just fifteen years old when she arrived at McLean with the conventional diagnosis—“adjustment reaction of adolescence”—stamped on the front jacket of her case record folder. In the fall of 1966, when she was sent to Belmont, June was plenty mixed up. An urban girl from a prominent, liberal Chicago family, she was predictably shocked by the death of her gregarious, popular father. Her mother’s subsequent remarriage forced the family to relocate, parachuting June into unfamiliar schools, first in the United States and then abroad. Despite an above-average IQ, June was not thriving in school. A psychiatrist friend of the family suggested McLean.

June is okay now. After McLean, she graduated from college, launched a successful career, and has published two books. She is smart, she is funny, and she can be plenty discombobulated. I was once talking with her on a cell phone when she blurted out, “Oh my God, I’m driving down a one-way street!” I later learned that she passed her Massachusetts driving test while living at McLean.

Like many former patients, June asked McLean for a copy of her case record and agreed to let me read and quote from it, with a few identifying details changed. It provides a fascinating keyhole through which to observe life on the wards during the late 1960s.

McLean Hospital and June Tavistock first made each other’s acquaintance just before noon on the morning of November 10, 1966. For the next eighteen months, the nurses in Codman Hall entered notes on her behavior three times a day. Here is the first of them:

McLean was still doing forty-day work-ups, meaning that the doctors spent five to six weeks of interviewing and testing just to diagnose new patients. By mid-December, two psychiatrists signed off on her eighteen-page case report, based on interviews with June, her mother, her brother, and several psychiatrists who had treated June during the previous twelve years. The result was a minibiography of a fifteen-year-old girl. The examining doctors surmised [correctly, I think] that the chronic illnesses and death of June’s father, a wealthy department store magnate and popular philanthropist, had traumatized the young girl and her immediate family. The doctors made note of the “comfortable trust fund” underwriting June’s hospital stay and mentioned the largesse of her uncle Rudolph, the fund’s trustee. They confirmed the “adjustment reaction” diagnosis and laid out a plan for treatment: “First and foremost, we intend to support patient’s wish to remain at McLean Hospital.” June had already entered the Arlington School and the doctors wanted her to continue. For therapy, they prescribed the mild tranquilizer Librium and intended for June to see a staff psychiatrist several times a week.