Summary Of Girl, Interrupted By Susanna Kaysen

“Girl, Interrupted” is the story of a young girl’s attempted suicide and her time in a psychiatric hospital. The author tells the story of her experience at McLean Hospital and the people she meets while she is there. In Susanna Kaysen’s “Girl, Interrupted,” the author uses the hospital records to symbolize inconclusiveness of her diagnosis to support the theme of confusion of social nonconformity with insanity. Many of the other patients at McLean Hospital have very obvious diagnosis’ such as psychopath or depressed, but Kaysen’s diagnosis is borderline personality disorder, which has symptoms that most teenages can relate to. Throughout her stay at McLean Hospital and years later when she reads her hospital records, Kaysen struggles with accepting herself and her diagnosis.

Kaysen makes many friends while she is at McLean Hospital, but she is very different from most of them.

One of the first characters you meet in the novel is Georgina. Georgina is Susanna’s roommate and she suffers from depression. She is very compassionate and has a serious relationship with wade, another patient at the hospital. Georgina shows no obvious signs of illness until Kaysen pours scalding hot caramel onto her hand and she doesn’t respond at all.
One of the more powerful characters is Lisa. Lisa acts as a leader of the girls and is very proud of her diagnosis as a psychopath and having a personality driven by self-interest. Lisa is very temperamental and can be extremely kind or perversely cruel to the other girls and staff. Lisa constantly tries to escape from the hospital and has no regard for the consequences of her actions. Lisa serves as a very frustrating, yet entertaining figure to the other girls and staff. She can bring out the dark side in the other girls and encourages disregard for

authority.
Susanna is eighteen when her doctor convinces her to admit herself into McLean Hospital. She is a bright young girl, but also very troubled. Before going to McLean she had an affair with her English teacher and attempted to commit suicide, but regretted it right after and passed out in the street so someone would find her. Her narrative is very emotionless and she is very detached from her adolescence. Kaysen is very unhappy while at McLean, but she never causes trouble and doesn’t understand why she is being kept there for so long when she was told she would only be there for a couple weeks.
Kaysen really struggles with accepting her diagnosis. Borderline personality disorder is described as “Uncertainty about several life issues, such as self-image, sexual orientation, long-term goals or career choice, types of friends or lovers to have” (Kaysen 150). This description can apply to most teenagers: insecure, moody, and fickle. Today this could just describe someone who did not conform to society, but during the time Kaysen was at McLean it was considered a mental illness. Years later when Kaysen researches her diagnosis she finds out that this illness is more commonly diagnosed in women. She struggles with the construction of the sentence and that it implies that just as many men have this illness, they just aren’t diagnosed with it. She notices that while she was at the hospital most disorders were more commonly diagnosed in women. She uses the example that to be labeled “compulsively promiscuous” a man would have to have sex with at least 15 women, but a woman would only have to have sex with a few men to get that label. Kaysen questions whether or not she would have even been considered ill if she was a man.