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| | The Mad Poets Society |
 | | cLean Hospital, in suburban Boston, is not the nation's oldest mental hospital; that distinction belongs to the Pennsylvania Hospital, in Philadelphia. |
 | | But before the advent of diagnose-dose-and-discharge mental-health care, McLean, which sits on a gorgeous 240-acre campus in the town of Belmont, was probably the country's most aristocratic mental institution and definitely its most literary. |
 | | The curious "McLean chic," which culminated in the unexpected success of the movie version of Susanna Kaysen's memoir, Girl, Interrupted, can be traced to the fall of 1953, when McLean's director, Franklin Wood, admitted a Smith College senior named Sylvia Plath, who was suffering from suicidal depression. |
| www.theatlantic.com /issues/2001/07/beam.htm (607 words) |
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