Under Observation: Life Inside the McLean Psychiatric Hospital

Behind closed doors at one of the country’s premier psychiatric hospitals.

Keisha is a delusional pregnant woman who believes her unborn child is the messiah. David is a suicidal compulsive foot washer who undergoes electroshock therapy. Julie has multiple personality disorder, a controversial illness that some doctors believe doesn’t really exist. Combining the case histories and personal stories of these and several other patients with information about mental illness, psychiatric research, treatment theory, and government and insurance regulations, veteran writer Lisa Berger and psychopharmacologist Alexander Vuckovic, MD, chronicle the work of the doctors and staff at McLean Hospital and draw a picture of life at psychiatric institutions across the country. Informative, powerful, important, and moving, Under Observation pushes beyond stereotypes about mental illness and its treatment to portray the alternatively dismaying and uplifting truth.

“Fascinating, complex, and important.”—Joanne Greenberg, author of I Never Promised You a Rose Garden