Inside the Bell Jar
Inside the Bell Jar / Psych Ward Meatloaf
By Billie Burton
Charting my journey as an inpatient on a secure psychiatric unit.
Hidden on the edge of Belmont, Massachusetts, lies a beautiful, leafy green campus peppered with grand, stately brick buildings. Amidst the wooded grounds, a labyrinthine warren of tunnels crisscrosses the campus, occasionally rising above the ground as if surfacing for air. The tunnels run like raised veins over the skin of the land, creating an arterial network that connects many of the buildings. McLean Hospital, then, felt (and was) deeply historic. Initially founded in Somerville in 1811, the ‘McLean Asylum for the Insane’ would move to its current location in Belmont in 1895. McLean’s most famous patient, Sylvia Plath, was treated at the hospital in 1953 and based much of her most famous work, ‘The Bell Jar’ (1963), on her time at McLean, before ending her life later that year. Another well-known patient, Susanna Kaysen, would author ‘Girl Interrupted’ (1993) based on her treatment at the hospital in the 1960s. ‘Girl Interrupted’ would go on to be a successful movie, with Angelina Jolie winning an Oscar for her performance. Today, McLean remains one of America’s foremost and storied psychiatric hospitals, as a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School and for being well-known for both its world-leading research and its eminent…
