Moonview

ove in at the instigation of Laurie Perlman, an ex-agent at Creative Artists Agency, who was testing alternative mental health treatments.

Perlman, in her early 50s, is founder and chief executive of Moonview Sanctuary, a new clinic for the rich and, often, famous. It is a kind of psyche-spa for the burned out, the depressed and the anxious elite who want anonymity and are willing to pay $175,000 a year for the latest innovations in mental health — no insurance accepted.

Levin, 66, is not a client. He is a “spiritual adviser” at the clinic and Perlman’s romantic partner. The two met when Perlman sought him out as a possible board member. Levin had just lost a bitter corporate battle and left AOL Time Warner in 2002. He told CNN that he wanted to put the “poetry” back in his life.

There is at least visual poetry at his office at Moonview in Santa Monica. It is an expansive suite of soothing earth-tone spaces, with $60,000 worth of art and antiques from Bali: a 6-foot-high drum, Rousseau-like paintings of verdant jungles, a plow that’s been turned into a bookshelf. The facility is cooland quiet except for the splashing of a fountain fashioned from a white marble Buddha.

In his years as a corporate titan, Levin never tried, but now he has tested many of the treatments Moonview offers. Like a former alcoholic who becomes a rehab counselor, he is a former corporate power junkie on hand to assist clients as they sort through their high-powered lives.

Moonview offers a dizzying array of 60 specialists offering Western and Eastern medicine, traditional psychiatry, psychopharmacology, talk therapy, neuro-feedback, high-tech scans that study brain waves, chiropractic services, acupuncture, reflexology, art therapy, equine therapy and more.

The practitioners include professors from the University of California, Los Angeles, and veterans of well-regarded local rehabilitation facilities, as well as shamans and psychics.

“This whole place was designed because when I was an agent, I saw people implode from high media exposure,” says Perlman, who represented Madonna back in the pop icon’s Lucky Star days.

Perlman launched Moonview a year ago and has poured $2 m into the venture. Perlman, who earned her psychology doctorate from Ryokan College, a nonaccredited program in Los Angeles, doesn’t position herself as the sanctuary guru — she insists that Moonview be run as a collective, with all decisions reached by a consensus of the core staff. But she does know celebrities.

“Let’s say somebody takes a tumble,” Perlman says. “That tumble ignites a huge damage cycle, whether it’s their concert schedule, or TV series, or their movie shooting, or their constituency, or their shareholders. They want privacy and a comprehensive team. It’s almost a pit crew approach to be able to get them fortified and back on track.”

Although Moonview isn’t suited to those who need hospitalization, it can treat a range of patients, says its medical director, Terry Eagan, a psychiatrist and a former chief resident of psychiatry at the University of Southern California. They include people suffering from mental-health issues such as “depression, anxiety, panic disorders, insomnia, pain disorders”.

Yet they can also help “patients with difficulty functioning in their world. Not that their brain isn’t working … their way of interacting with their world is just not working.”

Last spring, Moonview held an open house for executives of the powerhouse talent agency where Perlman once worked. Noshing on tuna sashimi and drinking mango-flavored water, the suited corporate warriors circulated through the clinic, listening to the specialists.

In one buttery yellow hall festooned with Balinese instruments, a neuropsychologist lectured on medication and psychotherapy not being enough when treating conditions such as bipolar disorder or depression. Down the hall, amid a room full of orchids and crystals, a sex therapist talked about sexuality not being restricted to the genitals.

For those who actually attend Moonview, the program begins with a 15-day, intensive 9-am-to-9 pm regimen. Clients who don’t live in Los Angeles are put up at luxury hotels and provided a 24-hour therapeutic buddy, as well as bodyguards and chauffeurs. They start with a complete physical and psychiatric evaluation and a scan known as a “quantitative electroencephalogram,” which assesses the patient’s brain function.

During the first three days, each patient gets an hour of neuro-feedback a day, a process that Perlman likens to “calisthenics for the brain.”

In the initial 15 days, the clients might see many of the practitioners until a customized treatment plan is devised, return quarterly for two- to three-day intensive sessions and continue with treatment regimens.

“Throughout the year, there’s a designed program for that individual,” says Perlman.

Moonview also tries to incorporate spirituality into the treatment plan. “It’s not sectarian,” says medical director Eagan.

Moonview works with an array of religious people, Eagan says, including Catholic priests, Buddhist monks and a Native American drumming specialist, among others.

Moonview declined to say how many patients have enrolled, although Levin says “enough to validate the concept and to get us thinking about expansion. The idea is to go to other locations and have the same concept, but it might trend more toward end of life”. Plans are under way for future centers in New York and Miami.