Girl Interrupted Sparknotes

Girl, Interrupted, is a true story written by Susanna Kaysen in 1993, based on her experiences in McLean Psychiatric Hospital as an eighteen year old girl. Susanna describes her experiences with the other patients, nurses, doctors, and even her life after being released. With a diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder, Susanna tries to help the reader understand what she as diagnosed with, along what she really felt and experienced while encaged in this facility as a young woman. Being taken through the journey of a woman’s struggle with mental health in the nineteen-sixties causes the reader to ponder on how mental health and its helping facilities have progressed over time and what exactly their purpose is for mentally ill persons.
In

April of 1967, Susanna Kaysen met with a psychiatrist for about twenty minutes and was then taxied off to McLean Psychiatric Hospital where she legally signs herself in for treatment. Upon arrival, she is greeted by different patients whom she would eventually find all of her memories involving. Polly, who she describes as a sweet soul who never complained or was mean but landed herself in McLean by lighting herself on fire. Lisa, who was the loud, opinionated patient who always found a way to escape but always ended right back with the rest of them. And finally, Georgina who was her roommate that always told stories about her boyfriends FBI of a father. These girls became her best “friends” along with a few other encounters like Daisy who would come and go but one thing they all noticed when she was there was her obsession for rotisserie chicken that she would keep carcases of under her bed. She was taken out of the facility only a few months after entering and went on to commit suicide on her birthday. One intimate story that Susanna shares about herself is her experience with suicide. The main reason she was evaluated by a psychiatrist was because she took an entire bottle of Aspirin to try and kill herself just days before checking herself into McLean hospital. Susanna has many different experiences within the hospital from watching her friends be thrown into seclusion and then return, or her daily encounters with her therapists. One of the most memorable stories from her time in McLean hospital was her description of the hospital itself. She says, “A long, long hallway: too long. Seven or eight double rooms on one side, the nursing station centered on the other… Lunatics to the left, staff to the right. The toilets and shower rooms were also to the right, as though the staff claimed oversight of our most private acts”(p. 45). Her description of the hospital was very eye opening to the small amount of privacy and freedom that these patients held. To give the reader more of an idea on their freedom, Susanna describes her time being able to walk with a group of patients and group of nurses to a local ice cream shop not too far from the hospital. She recalls being able to only have one nurse with her while some girls had three nurses for just one patient. She remembers feeling a tiny bit of freedom before returning to the hospital where they received five minute checks throughout the day to make sure they were behaving and where they were meant to be, including when they wanted to shave their legs. “..Did you bring my razor?.. She hands it over. She sits on the chair next to the bathtub. I’m eighteen years old . She’s twenty-two. She’s watching me shave my legs. We had a lot of hairy legs on our ward. Early feminists” (p. 57). Each of these stories were only a few of the examples Kaysen used to show the lack of trust and freedom the patients received from their “caregivers”.

Later in the book, Susanna goes more into depth about her two main keepers, Valerie, Dr. Wick, and Mrs. McWeeney. Valerie was everyone's favorite nurse because she was the only one that was not afraid of them. She talked back when they did, and she was the most reasonable when a patient tended to act out. Dr. Wick was a therapist that the patients enjoyed nothing more than to mess with. They would use sexual words and even make up false stories just to make Dr. Wick uneasy or uncomfortable. This shortened their time having to talk to her which Susanna describes as an advantage considering she did nothing to help her anyway. Mrs. McWeeney was the only nurse they feared because she liked to handle things in the meanest, harshest way possible, her own way. Susanna goes on to describe feeling almost more free at times than she did when out of the hospital. She says, “As long as we were willing to be upset, we didn’t have to get jobs or go to school. We could weasel out of anything except eating and taking our medication. In a strange way, we were free” (p.94). She says that they had already lost their dignity and privacy, therefore they could not

lose anything else, making them free. Towards the end of the book, Susanna is released from McLean hospital and begins her search for a job in the real word to which she learns that to even buy a telephone or get her drivers license, she needs a note from her doctor. Eventually she goes on to marry a man she knew before entering the hospital and runs into both Georgina and Lisa. Georgina is married and traveling the country while Lisa is a suburban mom of one. In reflection of her time before, during, and after McLean Psychiatric Hospital, she visits a certain painting that she had been to before, called Girl Interrupted at Her Music, she realizes that this painting is a representation of herself, an always changing interpretation of her life.
After readings Girl, Interrupted, there are only three critiques.

The first critique is the unspoken and sometimes unknown presence of mental health throughout the years. Clearly mental health is something that has been around for so long and to see how uncomfortable people are about it in 2018, one might find it surprising to have a book written in the nineties about someone with borderline personality disorder. The second critique is the parental stress that we do not see. We have talked in class about parental stress being caused by their children and in this case, having to send their child to a psychiatric hospital and seeing them suffer had to have caused some type of stressor on Susanna’s parents but we are not shown that side of it. From what we have learned, one would assume that this situation would potentially cause cases of anxiety and depression. The final critique would be about the way the hospital itself was run and the practice of the nurses and doctors. I think that the way they treated these patients is very inhumane. They do not listen to the way they are feeling they just automatically give them drugs when they ‘act out’. While I understand in psychiatric hospitals this is sometimes the necessary action to take, I thought it was very unnecessary a majority of the times she described it considering the patients were just trying to express concern or frustration. I also recognize that her experiences took place in the late sixties but it made me think

hard about what psychiatric hospitals like McLean are like in 2018. Do they just shove pills down the patients throats or do they do something about these mentally ill people that they would actually benefit from. When thinking about how this hospital was run, it makes the reader get the idea that the nurses and therapists had no hope for these patients to one day get back out to their real lives in the real world, therefore they were not going to try and help them get out. They just showed up to work, had their pointless meetings, and went home to their lives. These thoughts are what proposed my question of what exactly the purpose of these hospitals are; to heal or to contain.