"A magical island. A dangerous task. A burning secret. Linus Baker leads a quiet, solitary life. At forty, he lives in a tiny house with a devious cat and his old records. As a Case Worker at the Department in Charge Of Magical Youth, he spends his days overseeing the well-being of children in government-sanctioned orphanages. When Linus is unexpectedly summoned by Extremely Upper Management he's given a curious and highly classified assignment: travel...

Provides a history of the institution in Polk, Pennsylvania that cares for mentally challenged people in a residential setting.

A stand-alone fantasy tale from Seanan McGuire's Alex Award-winning Wayward Children series, which began in the Alex, Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Award-winning, World Fantasy Award finalist, Tiptree Honor List Every Heart a Doorway. This fourth entry and prequel tells the story of Lundy, a very serious young girl who would rather study and dream than become a respectable housewife and live up to the expectations of the world around her. As well she should....

"Regan loves, and is loved, though her school-friend situation has become complicated, of late. When she suddenly finds herself thrust through a doorway that asks her to "Be Sure" before swallowing her whole, Regan must learn to live in a world filled with centaurs, kelpies, and other magical equines - a world that expects its human visitors to step up and be heroes. But after embracing her time with the herd, Regan discovers that not all forms of...

McLean Hospital is one of the most famous, most elite, and was among the most luxurious mental institutions in America. In its "golden age," McLean provided as gracious and gentle an environment for the treatment of mental illness as one could imagine. Gracefully Insane chronicles the hopes and failures of psychology and psychotherapy, the evolution of attitudes about mental illness, and the economic pressures that are making McLean, and other institutions...

Discovering an abandoned newborn while working behind the tenement houses of late-nineteenth-century New York, Sylvan finds his life intertwined with that of a sideshow performer's daughter and a woman wrongly trapped in a lunatic asylum.

Abandoned by his parents when he was just three years old, Rob Mitchell began his journey as one of the last "lifers" in an American orphanage. He grew up with kids who were not friends but rather "co-survivors." As Rob's loneliness and rage grew, his hope shrank. Would he ever find a real family or a place to call home? Find out how Rob was able to overcome his past, forgiving his relatives and forging healthy family relationships of his own. Heartbreaking,...

In Lives They Left Behind, contents of several suitcases left behind in the attic of the Willard Psychiatric Center in upstate New York after closing in 1995 were examined and compared to the written record to create a moving group portrait of 20th century American psychiatric care.

"Portraying existing conditions at the County Home at Saegertown, in Crawford County, Penn'a, together with illustrations of present buildings and needful, new ones, as well as recommendations for the future conduct of the institution.

"It's 1927 and eighteen-year-old Mary Engle is hired to work as a secretary at a remote but scenic institution for mentally disabled women called the Nettleton State Village for Feebleminded Women of Childbearing Age. She's immediately in awe of her employer--brilliant, genteel Dr. Agnes Vogel. Dr. Vogel had been the only woman in her class in medical school. As a young psychiatrist she was an outspoken crusader for women's suffrage. Now, at age forty,...