Girl, Interrupted, By Susanna Kaysen

The Lack of Credibility and More According to the Mayo Clinic, mental illness has a wide range of mental health disorders that affect a person's mood, thinking and behavior. Some examples of mental illnesses are depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, and addictive behavior. These examples of mental illness are very clear in the readings Girl, Interrupted and “The Yellow Wallpaper”. Girl, Interrupted is a narrative book written by Susanna Kaysen. It takes place in 1967, when she was only eighteen years of age she writes about her two years spent in McLean Hospital; a place for mentally ill people. She discusses her surroundings and mental approach of processing her state of mind. Much like the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”

In the vignette The Taxi (7), she takes us to the point in time where she has a discussion with a doctor. It was a short interaction with one another. Next, she finds herself being shoved into a taxi by no choice of her own, headed to a mental hospital. Thinking she will only be there for a couple of weeks she find out later that the doctor had written on the admission sheet three years. Mentally ill patients have been writing their thoughts down for years and many doctors have even changed or distorted the experience to fit their own rules. This was addressed by Gail A. Hornstein she wrote” Narrative of Madness, as told from Within.” The trust that people give to doctors and men of high stature in that time period was believed in and never really questioned. If he said you were ill then you must be ill, with no other factors to be mentioned. Men were convincing and believable and women were not. Sexism is another theme seen in this book and is looked at in the vignettes New Frontiers in Dental Health and My Diagnosis. In New Frontiers in Dental Health she tells her social worker that she wants to be a writer, which then the social worker scoffs and suggests becoming a dental assistant. A writer is nothing in the world and a dental assistant is something. Kaysen also takes a look back to the time she was with a typing company and the male supervisor was allowed to smoke in the office and the females were not. Kaysen States. “Sexism! It was Pure sexism.” (133). Her struggle with sexism was persistent. As a woman, acting out or speaking up was wrong and if you were a mentally ill women you were twice as wrong. Hornstein states, “Patients complaints about being unheard have often been dismissed as evidence of their illness.”To be told you are ill because someone doesn't understand you is one thing but to be totally dismissed when explaining what's going on in your head is another and