McLean Hospital

McLean Hospital is a mental hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts noted for the large number of famous people who have been treated there, including Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Nash, and poets Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath. The hospital is also the destination for students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University who are in danger of suicide or who show signs of schizophrenia or other mental illnesses which often first manifest themselves at college age.

An interesting book on the history of McLean is Alex Beam's Gracefully Insane: The Rise and Fall of America's Premier Mental Hospital (ISBN 1891620754); some memoirs of time spent within McLean's walls include Sylvia Plath's novel The Bell Jar and Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted (ISBN 0679746048), which was made into a movie starring Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie.