Gracefully Insane (40 page)

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.

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.”

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.”

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 Scofield’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.

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.

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.

Kahne’s title of director of residency training carried other duties as well. There is a 1961 memo in the McLean files over his signature, laying down the ground rules for use of the tennis courts and golf course by the young trainees. Tennis was available to the resident doctors only in the morning before 9 A.M. “The golf course may be used at any time during the day or evening,” Kahne wrote. “Because the course is small and pedestrians walk through the playing area, golfers are requested to adhere to safety rules, and heed the warning call of ‘Fore.’”

The
Globe
published a lengthy obituary when its revered, longtime employee passed away in 1982, and although it did mention his “psychiatric afflictions,” it did not record his coauthorship of
Close to Home.
Choate- and Harvard-educated, rich, a witty raconteur and a mixer of ferocious dry martinis, Heilner was a classic McLean consumer. His friend and colleague Jack Thomas recalls that Heilner, upon learning of a threatened strike at the newspaper, immediately checked himself into McLean. “He explained that he had a panic attack,” Thomas says. “‘I couldn’t stand the idea of no structure,’ was what he said.”

Four years after she checked out of McLean, Plath noted in her journal that a recent issue of
Cosmopolitan
magazine had two articles on mental health. “I
must
write one about a college girl suicide,” she wrote. “And a story, a novel even. Must get out SNAKE PIT. There is an increasing market for mental-hospital stuff. I am a fool if I don’t relive, recreate it.”

Here are the comments of a woman who spent almost two years in Codman House at McLean, starting in 1963, after a stay at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas: “I always mentally compared McLean with Menninger, and Menninger was just marvelous, it was beautiful, the appointments were incredible, fantastic, and the whole philosophy between the two hospitals was so different. Menninger kept you busy every minute, from 8 A.M. until you went to bed, they had your day planned for you. Where McLean’s idea was, well if you get up, that’s fine, we’d like to have you dressed by 8:30 or 9, but there were no real attempts to move you. Menninger would have you up doing these god-awful chores, stacking wood, and carrying wood to the doctors’ houses, which was probably better for us in the long run.”

Because of the Boston aristocracy’s penchant for marrying “cousins”—usually distant relatives—the name Louis Agassiz Shaw is less rare than one might think. For instance, there was a Harvard medical professor named Louis Agassiz Shaw who was arrested in 1927 for operating a still out of his “palatial home on 6 Marlboro Street in the Back Bay,” according to the
Boston Globe.
Like my Louis, he too graduated from Noble and Greenough School and Harvard, although unlike his McLean namesake, this man made a genuine contribution to society: Professor Shaw invented the iron lung.

The name Louis Agassiz Shaw also crops up in Sylvia Plath’s journal in her description of an April 1959 visit to a Beacon Hill neighbor: “She came from a family of Shaws, her son married a Shaw (no relation) and her daughter, (about 45?) had a young man, also a Shaw, Louis Agassiz Shaw, (Junior), and her daughter-in-law’s uncle, or father, was also, oddly enough, named Louis Agassiz Shaw.” One of these men must have been my Louis; the Harvard professor and inventor of the iron lung had been dead for nineteen years.

Although there is of course the odd nugget to entice serious Shavians. Louis would later tell his McLean caretakers that he had been mistreated as a child, locked in closets when he was bad, and so on. In
Pavement,
his protagonist, the wealthy, aspiring flapper Kit, serves up this grim condemnation of the wonder years: “Most childhood is oppression and suppression and depression, however much poets sing and grandparents cry over their silver pushers.”

Louis wrote letters from Bridgewater to his friend Jonathan Bayliss, complaining about the “hellhole” of public accommodations: “This is an impossible place to be because the other inmates are so far gone.... Loud music blares all day. It is unbelievably terrible.... There are fifty-five other inmates in this room and except for two or three they are all looney.” His lawyer held out hope for a transfer; “I’m hoping and praying it will be McLean’s,” Louis wrote. “So many people ... tell me how their nephews or cousins or best friends have been there.”

Once in Belmont, Louis waxes confident that the legal wizardry that kept him out of jail will soon free him: “It is quite likely that I may be home during the summer. This means that I shall be well enough (it is hoped) so that I can stand trial. The lawyer tells me that this will just be a formality and I will be acquitted and go home.”

BPD has occasioned a good deal of skepticism even within the psychiatric profession. The 1999
Dictionary of Psychology
calls BPD a “vague phrase for a group of psychological conditions that are characterized between normality and neurosis, between neurosis and psychosis, or between normal intelligence and mental retardation.” In his 1998
History of Psychiatry,
Dr. Edward Shorter mocks BPD as “Woody Allen syndrome.” The diagnosis does crop up at the strangest times. For instance, in her 1999 bestseller
Diana: In Search of Herself,
journalist Sally Bedell Smith cites “compelling evidence” that the late Princess Diana had a borderline personality disorder.

At some length, Freeman dwelt on his hunch that Alfred Stanton’s intellectual mentor, Harry Stack Sullivan, committed suicide in Paris in 1949. Freeman noted that Sullivan once predicted that he would die at the age of fifty-seven years, five months, and three days. Sullivan actually died at age fifty-six, but Freeman pointed out that if one counts Sullivan’s “time of quickening”—in utero—then his prediction was accurate.

Altschule left McLean under a cloud, suggesting in a videotaped interview that he was persona non grata on the psychoanalytically oriented campus. While there, he made one discovery of lasting importance. As the hospital’s director of internal medicine, he was alarmed by the number of patient deaths during electroshock therapy. He correctly deduced that an injection of the depressant atropine might relax the cardiovascular system before shock; atropine is still used for this purpose.

Five hundred milligrams of chloral hydrate is not a lethal dose, leaving open the possibility that the police report may be wrong or that Shein took the medication in a lethal combination with other drugs. The medical examiner noted the presence of a barbiturate in Shein’s blood, but chloral hydrate is not a barbiturate.

Merton Kahne remembers walking ashen-faced into a similar meeting on November 22, 1963. The clinical director, Dr. Samuel Silverman, inquired what was wrong. “The president of the United States is dead,” Kahne reported. “And they just went right on with the conference.”