Girl Interrupted
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Selected Book Details
- Paperback
- Edition: Largeprint
- Author: Susanna Kaysen
- Publisher: Thorndike Press
- Release Date: June 2001
- ISBN-10: 0786225971
- ISBN-13: 9780786225972
- List Price: $27.95
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Summaries and Customer Reviews provided by Amazon
SummaryWhen reality got "too dense" for 18-year-old Susanna Kaysen, she was hospitalized. It was 1967, and reality was too dense for many people. But few who are labeled mad and locked up for refusing to stick to an agreed-upon reality possess Kaysen's lucidity in sorting out a maelstrom of contrary perceptions. Her observations about hospital life are deftly rendered; often darkly funny. Her clarity about the complex province of brain and mind, of neuro-chemical activity and something more, make this book of brief essays an exquisite challenge to conventional thinking about what is normal and what is deviant. |
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Living in Two Worlds
Rating:
First, be warned: this is nothing like the movie. Some of the characters are the same, but this book does not follow the same linear, safe direction as the film. Most of the events of the movie don't even take place in the book. This is a memoir of the truest sense, in that the author explores simply her own understandings of her experience, her illness, and her surroundings. Kaysen's diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder, although not discussed until the final chapters, is the overall theme of this book. Kaysen, like many of her fellow patients, is straddling the line between sanity and insanity, between the world outside the hospital and the world inside. She identifies with both the other patients and the nurses, who each represent the world they inhabit. Even though she feels a kinship with her fellow "insane" patients, she also longs for the sense of normalcy that the nurses bring in from the outside.
Although she is declared "recovered" upon her discharge in 1969, Kaysen freely admits that once you're insane, that other world never really disappears. It hovers around the edges, and even affects people who have never been inside a hospital, as if she carries a "crazy cloud" around with her. Kaysen explores the difference between insanity of the brain and insanity of the mind, arguing that each need to be treated differently. She also includes actual documents from her medical records from her time at the hospital, which provide an interesting backdrop for the narrative of the so-called "insane" person. This isn't The Bell Jar. There is no real mental breakdown, no literary examination of one's own insanity. Although Kaysen does explore her own illness to a degree, this is mostly an exploration of the dual worlds that mentally ill people must inhabit: the world of the sane, and the world of the insane.
Just as Described - Bestseller Material!
Rating:
I read this book several years ago and ordered it again because I really couldn't remember much about it. Suffice it to say I read the book in a single sitting; I fell in love with the characters all over again and the situations and stories the author tells both made me laugh, cringe and empathize at all the right times. Read it, you'll love it!
A Girl is Institutionalized Based on a Short Psychiatric Assessment
Rating:
This is a very interesting memoir of a woman who was hospitalized in a
psychiatric institution from the age of 18 through 22 years old based on
a psychiatric interview given by a psychiatrist who had never met her be-
fore and that lasted less than an hour.
Her diagnosis was Borderline Personality Disorder. She manages to de-
scribe the symptoms of this diagnosis as parallel to adolescent angst.
Her observations and perceptions of other female patients are both mov-
ing and numerous.
I highly recommend this book for anyone who enjoys memoirs with a
bent toward psychological insight.
like cuckoo's nest and Bell Jar....
Rating:
This is alot like One flew over the Cuckoo's Nest and Bell Jar. It is not as descriptive as the other books, but does lend alot of insights in the psychiatric ward's in the 1960's..
all that Freud crap.
Really interesting and easy read.
Girl, Interrupted, a timely story against the mental health system that withstands the test of time
Rating:
Girl, Interrupted: the book, the movie, the real life behind the story, and a rant against the mental illness system
You may have heard of the book: Girl, Interrupted.
You may have seen the movie of the same name.
The book came out in 1993, the movie, in 2000. The book was re-issued at the time of the movie debut.
This was based on a memoir by Susanna Kaysen, a young woman in the late 1960s who lived in Cambridge, Mass. and was hospitalized at the famous McLean Hospital, in Belmont, Massachusetts, the psychiatric institution affiliated with Harvard University.
When the movie came out, people I know said:
Oh yeah, I remember Susanna. So and so dated her. I remember when all this happened to her. Great book. Terrific movie.
***
Susanna Kaysen grew up in an upper-middle class family in the Cambridge area of Massachusetts. Her parents were professional and well-to-do. Her father was director of an institute in Princeton, N.J. Not sure what position he held in Cambridge, but it was not dissimilar. Her family lived on Wendell Street in Cambridge, which is in the Harvard area. They had moved one year earlier from Princeton, New Jersey.
In the mid 1960s in this part of the world, and affiliated with the movers and shakers of the intellectual power structure of this area, her parents were status oriented, and likely cool, distant, or just clueless as to who their daughter really was.
Susanna Kaysen wanted to be a writer.
She overdosed on vodka and aspirin and ended up in McLean hospital. She was 18 in 1967, the tail end of the worst years in the mental illness system.
The movie makes some significant departures from the book, and the author, Susanna Kaysen, was quite upset about those, mainly about the movies' melodramatic tone, and also with the event of Susanna (Winona Rider) and the sociopath Lisa (Angelina Jolie) running off together, which never happened.
Susanna had an affair with a professor, apparently giving him rim jobs, and was confronted by the professor's wife about this.
Susanna was a sensitive girl, surrounded by parents and a society insensitive and largely unaware of her needs. Though she technically signed herself into the hospital voluntarily, she was not able to leave on her own free will. She basically had to sign herself in. She spoke to a psychiatrist her parents recommended, she recited the section I included below as an excerpt, and she was told to sign herself in.
The hospital in the movie is "Claymoore" but it is McLean Hospital in the book, with actual documents from Susanna's life, including the admitting document of an 18-yo girl, who presented with:
"psychoneurotic depressive reaction, personality pattern disturbance, mixed type, R/O undifferentiated schizophrenia," and was finally diagnosed with borderline personality.
According to the DSM-IV, the current version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association
psychoneurotic depressive reaction: - not in the DSM- IV, 1994. The DSM manual current at the time of Kaysen's hospitalization was the DSM-1.
personality pattern disturbance, mixed type: - not in the DSM-IV.
undifferentiated schizophrenia: - this is in the DSM-IV, but it was considered as R/O (Rule out) only. I consider this to be a garbage diagnosis; most dx of schizophrenia are either paranoid or catatonic.
borderline personality: - this is in the DSM-IV, below.
301.83 describes a prolonged disturbance of personality function, characterized by depth and variability of moods, typically involving unusual levels of instability in mood, such as "black and white" thinking, or splitting - chaotic and unstable interpersonal relationships, and behavior, as well as a disturbance in the individual's sense of self. In extreme cases, this disturbance in the sense of self can lead to periods of dissociation. These disturbances can have a pervasive negative impact on many or all of the psychosocial facets of life. This includes difficulties maintaining relationships in work, home, and social settings. Attempted suicide and completed suicide are possible outcomes, especially without proper care and effective therapy. Onset of symptoms typically occurs during adolescence or young adulthood.
It is also noted that in cases of overdosing or cutting, that the diagnosis of borderline personality should not be applied.
I onsider the dx of Borderline personality disorder to be a wastebasket diagnosis.
Every symptom or behavior above can be attributed to stress, PTSD, abuse, or other environmental cause, none of which are the fault of the patient.
Most people in counseling or psychiatric care only need the following:
To socialize with people and to have meaningful work.
Isolation will drive a person nuts.
Lack of meaningful work leads to low self-esteem.
The combination of isolation and low-self esteem, especially when combined with an environment that does not understand the person, is not a recipe for a good outcome.
There was really nothing wrong with Susanna Kaysen, yet she spent 18 months in the hospital, paid for by her parents, and/or her health insurance.
James Taylor, and later Kate and Livingston Taylor also enjoyed stays at McLean Hospital, a place, James Taylor said was where rich parents put their kids when they didn't fit in. Not far from the truth.
In fact, in the case of the Taylors and with Susanna, it was the absolute truth.
There were decades in which husbands who were tired of their wives (who often became lonely and depressed) could get them institutionalized. Parents who didn't understand their children institutionalized them. Minorities and the poor, who are most often the most misunderstood of all, and acting out because of the abuse the poverty and their status in society heaps upon them, were also heavily institutionalized, usually in the county hospital system.
There are people with actual mental disorders, mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia or bipolar illness, but Susanna was not one of those.
In the book and the movie, her boyfriend (a young guy her age, not the professor with whom she has an affair), want her to leave.
There is a lot wrong with a professional field, especially one dealing with human relations and the human psyche, in which so much has changed, in which a field could be so very wrongheaded not so very many years ago.
I should reframe that statement to say: I should be grateful that the mental health system has improved its diagnosis and treatment of people who are misunderstood, instead of treating them with professional blinders.
At McLean Hospital with Susanna, among others, was a young girl who had thrown acid on her face, an anorexic young woman who was sexually abused by her father and who later hangs herself in her apartment after she leaves the hospital when Lisa mercilessly accuses the girl (Daisy) of having enjoyed having incestuous sex with her own father, but most of the young woman on the ward are not actually mentally ill. There was also the sociopath, Lisa, the most seriously so-called 'disturbed' and I suspect, among the most seriously abused by her family.
Some of the movie was actually filmed in Belmont at McLean Hospital, but most was filmed at Harrisburg State Hospital, and the town scenes were from Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania.
There was some front-door film footage of the actual McLean Hospital.
Jolie received an Oscar for her role as Lisa, as best supporting actress in a drama.
Most people of that era (1950s - 1960s - pre 1970s) who sought counseling, psychiatric help or who entered psychiatric institutions were often more the victims of their environment than actual sufferers of serious mental illness.
Yet the system at that time failed to recognize the difference between a shy or misunderstood person brought up in a cold, hostile or abusive environment who made suicide gestures (overdosing or cutting) and a person with actual psychosis.
I am not going to defend the mental health profession of those days for their ignorance. They were professionals who were brought up in affluent environments, who studied with blinders, who never thought out-of-the-box, and who treated many people poorly, both in their offices and in the hospital settings. Many never tried to think out of the box.
Sadly, this is often the case, still. The diagnoses are different, perhaps a bit better, but many in the field are not necessarily well-suited for their job, with many themselves being shy, or not particularly well-adjusted, or acquainted much with the real world of people and problems. Most are outsiders trying to look in, rather than insiders looking in.
Only insiders looking in actually know the score. The vast number of outsiders trying to look in can do more harm than good.
Susanna was fortunate in that she was in a private hospital, rather than a state facility, where people were routinely given ECT therapy, which was much more common and much more damaging than now. Many were given ECT therapy in private hospitals, also during those years, but it was even more rampant in the state facilities.
In both the book and the movie, Susanna's boyfriend both confront her by saying she really needs to get out of the hospital - that the hospital is simply using her, that there is nothing wrong with her, and that if she doesn't leave, the hospital will keep her forever.
The book and the movie end with an epilogue that within a few years, in the 1970s, all of Susanna's co-patients had been released from the hospital.
***
Susanna's writing is simple, direct, entrancing.
In the first chapter, Toward a Topography of the Parallel Universe, the book opens:
EXCERPT
"People ask, How did you get in there? What they really want to know is if they are likely to end up there as well. I can't answer the real question. All I tell them is, It's easy.
And it is easy to slip into a parallel universe. There are so many of them: worlds of the insane, the criminal, the crippled, the dying, perhaps of the dead as well. These worlds exist alongside this world and resemble it, but are not in it.
My roommate Georgina came in swiftly and totally, during her junior year at Vassar. She was in a theater watching a movie when a tidal wave of blackness broke over her head. The entire world was obliterated -- for a few minutes. She knew she had gone crazy. She looked around to see if it had happened to everyone, but all the other people were engrossed in the movie. She rushed out because the darkness in the theater was too much when combined with the darkness in her head.
And after that? I asked her.
A lot of darkness, she said.
But most people pass over incrementally, making a series of perforations in the membrane between here and there until an opening exists...In the parallel universe, the laws of physics are suspended. ..Time, too is different. It may run in circles, flow backwards, skip about from now and then...Another odd feature of the parallel universe is that although it is invisible from this side, once you are in it you can easily see the world you came from. Sometimes the world you came from looks huge and menacing....other times it is miniaturized and alluring. a-spin and shining in its orbit. Either way, it can't be discounted.
Every window on Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco."
END EXCERPT
Brilliant.
Not crazy or unorthodox or weird by any one's estimation today; yet, no one understood this at the time.
What does that say about previous decades?
Only now are some writers and some mental health professionals able to look at their field as skewed from human reality, as in the book: The Loss of Sadness: HowPsychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder. (Horvitz, Wakefield, Oxford University Press, 2007)
This book is being touted as a tour-de-force that will alter professional thinking.
Billiant. Absolutely brilliant premise.
And it is about darned time psychiatry came around to the obvious.
Susanna Kaysen, who at one time doubted a life could be made from boyfriends and writing, managed to do very well, making a life out of boyfriends and writing.
An excellent book.
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