Girl, Interrupted, the Author Susanna Kaysen Talks

Girl, Interrupted, the author Susanna Kaysen talks about her year and a half in a "mental hospital."; The language is by turns funny, quirky, or brutally strong, but always shows remarkable insight into at least some facets of herself. J

The topic she either dodges or diminishes throughout the book is why she was there. She was a "voluntary admission," although she was obviously under great pressure from both family and the psychiatrist who admitted her. She acknowledges that she made a suicide attempt, although she saved herself by getting herself to a public area where she collapsed.

In the beginning of the book we are told that the psychiatrist seemed to focus on a pimple she had picked at that day. The suggestion at this time is that the psychiatrist wildly over-interpreted this to get to a common symptom of her diagnosis, "borderline personality" -- self-mutilation. Then at the very end of the book she mentions that she also used to scratch her face and rub soap in the scratches to aggravate them and make them look worse.

She also makes the point that her friend Georgina "knew" she had gone crazy. The author described a specific moment when Georgina's sanity came crashing in upon her, but the author can identify no particular moment. Does that mean she was not what we think of as "mentally ill"

Perhaps it depends on how you define it. Some would say the line between sanity, even flawed sanity, and mental illness, is the point at which you don't have a good grip on reality. Georgina would seem to fit that description; she looked around the movie theatre to see if what happened in her mind had happened to everyone. It is not realistic to think that everyone in the movie theatre would experience what she experienced, at that same time. It does suggest a lack of full connection with reality.

The author writes an engrossing story about her time at McLean Hospital, but we learn far more about the difficulties her ward mates have than the difficulty she has. She is, ultimately, unrevealing about herself. At the end of the book, she acknowledges that she didn't just attempt suicide once but thought about it quite a bit as well. That would not make her a danger to society, but it certainly made her a danger to herself.

At the book she also notes that she is considered "recovered." Kaysen suggests that she isn't convinced of this, but doesn't give hard specifics. She asks others to verify that she's not acting in a "crazy" way: She acknowledges that she indulged in a lot of self-pity, and that she lacked a sense of identity. She says her diagnosis should be "identity disorder," not "borderline personality disorder."

When she was hospitalized, in 1968, promiscuity was part of the diagnosis. She notes that the diagnostic criteria don't give an quantifiable numbers to determine who is promiscuous and who is not, and yet most people know what they mean by the word. In fact she did have an affair, in high school, with her high school English teacher, at great cost to him: he was fired and moved to another state. She does not acknowledge anywhere that this behavior was inappropriate, that she played a part in what happened, or that she participated in something that was very harmful to another human being. It seems likely, however, that a psychiatrist in 1968 would consider that "promiscuous behavior."

At the end of the book, Kaysen gives the diagnostic criteria for Borderline Personality disorder, and explains how to tell it from "Identity Disorder." It appears that Identity Disorder is considered to be developmental in nature -- in other words, the person will grow past it.