McLean Hospital history

Consequently, more than 18 acres of the former Joseph Barrell country estate located about two miles outside of Boston in Charlestown, Massachusetts [later Somerville, Massachusetts] was purchased in December 1816.

“The “Asylum for the Insane” opened its doors in October of 1818.

By 1821, 149 people had received care at the Asylum.

In 1823, a Boston merchant named John McLean left a generous bequest to the insane asylum, which renamed itself after him.

The hospital was renamed the McLean Asylum for the Insane in 1826, after John McLean, a wealthy shipping magnate who bequeathed more than $100,000 to it.

Horace Mann, then a young state representative, delivered a speech to the legislature in 1828 declaring that “the insane are the wards of the state,” ushering in the era of public psychiatric hospitals in Massachusetts.

The famous children’s nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” was written about Mary Sawyer, an attendant who joined the McLean staff in 1832.

The first to open was the Worcester Insane Asylum, in 1833.

After she died in 1834 the hospital received a gift totaling nearly $120,000, owing to a residual legacy of more than $90,000.

Nathaniel Ingersoll Bowditch, A History of the Massachusetts General Hospital (Boston: Printed by the Trustees from the Bowditch Fund, 1872), 468.

The hospital purchased the site in 1875 for $75,000.

McLean opened the first psychiatric school of nursing in 1882.

The asylum was renamed the McLean Hospital for the Mentally Ill in 1892.

In April 1895, the first patients were transferred from the Asylum in Somerville to Belmont.

(Frederick Law Olmsted suffered from mental illness later in life, and checked into McLean in 1898.

1944 – Doctor Jordi Folch-Pi is named McLean’s first Director of Scientific Research.

1946 – The Biological Research Laboratory (later to evolve into the Mailman Research Center) opens.

In 1953, a depressed 20-year old Smith student named Sylvia Plath crawled under her house and swallowed a bottle of her mother’s sleeping pills.

1957 – McLean develops a procedure, adopted worldwide, for extracting and identifying brain lipids.

Lowell described the conditions at Bowditch Hall in a 1958 letter to poet Elizabeth Bishop: “It was like entering some ancient deceased sultan’s seraglio.

– Robert Lowell, “Waking in the Blue,” 1959

1960 – McLean becomes the first center for electron microscopy in a United States psychiatric institution, providing the ability to view the structure of individual nerve cells in the brain.

1973 – Established the first Alcohol and Drug Abuse Research Center in a private American psychiatric hospital, the nation’s largest and most comprehensive research facility of its kind devoted to the study of addictive disorders.

1977 – The Laboratories for Psychiatric Research are established in the Mailman Research Center, doubling the size of the building and adding two new floors.

1978 – McLean establishes the country’s first National Institutes of Health- and private-foundation supported Brain Bank for the study of neuropsychiatric diseases.

1983 – McLean releases the first clinical report on the use for beta-blockers to treat restlessness (akathisia), a major side-effect of antipsychotic agents.

1984 – McLean establishes the first controlled outcome study evaluating the effects of psychoanalytic psychotherapy for patients with schizophrenia.

Silvia B. Sutton, Crossroads in Psychiatry: A History of the McLean Hospital (Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Press, 1986), 10.

1988 – McLean becomes the first psychiatric hospital in the world to establish a Brain Magnetic Resonance Imaging Center.

McLean suspended prominent psychiatrist Edward M. Daniels in 1990, after four former patients alleged that he had sexually abused them.

Girl Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen (Turtle Bay Books, 1993)

Lisa Berger and Alexander Vuckovic, M.D., Under Observation: Life Inside a Psychiatric Hospital (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1994), 253.

1995 – The first study in healthy children combining anatomic, chemical and functional data on brain development begins at McLean.

1996 – Researchers at McLean discover the first evidence indicating a chemical abnormality of nerve-cell function in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease, a finding that ultimately leads to the first FDA-approved treatments for Alzheimer’s.

Andrew Cohen, “Last Days of the Asylum,” Boston magazine, March 1997, 62.

1998 – McLean is the first to publish reports that the use of steroids by body builders is associated with the induction of psychiatric symptoms, including violent behavior.

1999 – McLean is the first to demonstrate that absorption of the essential nutrient choline into the brain decreases with age.

2000 – The Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center at McLean (the “Brain Bank”) receives its 5,000th donated brain specimen.

Alex Beam, Gracefully Insane: The Rise and Fall of America’s Premier Mental Hospital (New York: PublicAffairs, 2001), 4.

2002 – McLean Hospital’s Alcohol and Drug Abuse Research Center (ADARC) received the largest single grant in McLean’s history.

Steven Tyler performing with Aerosmith on the National Mall in 2003

Saskia Hamilton, ed., The Letters of Robert Lowell (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005), 315-316.

Robert Lowell, “Waking in the Blue,” in Robert Lowell: Selected Poems, Expanded Edition (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006), 125-126.

2007 – McLean Hospital investigators conducted the first national survey of individuals with eating disorder, showing that binge eating disorder is more prevalent than either anorexia nervosa or bulimia nervosa.

Justin Martin, Genius of Place: The Life of Frederick Law Olmsted (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2011), 311.

The McLean “brain bank,” the world’s largest collection of brain tissue, experienced a catastrophic accident in 2012, when a freezer malfunction ruined 150 valuable tissue samples.

In the aftermath of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, McLean collaborated with law enforcement agencies to establish the “LEADER” program, designed to treat police officers, soldiers, and paramedics suffering from illnesses such as addiction, depression, and post-traumatic stress.

2014 – The Society for Neuroscience (SfN) awarded the Julius Axelrod Prize to Joseph T. Coyle, MD, chief scientific officer and chief of the Center of Excellence in Basic Neuroscience of McLean Hospital.