Girl Interrupted: A Girl Walking the Thin Line Between Sane and Crazy Mackenzie McNabb Fort Mill High School Living in a mental hospital for almost two years, Susanna Kaysen wonders why she is there and if she belongs there. Without getting any true answers from her doctors, she struggles to accept her disorder and working to get rid of it. The movie, Girl Interrupted is full of psychological principles I’ve learned throughout the year, which play a role in how Susanna grows as a character. Besides the fact that Susanna has a Borderline Personality Disorder, she is a victim of conformity and self-fulfilling prophecies. These principles are what determine if Susanna is sane or not, and if she will be able to come …show more content…
One of the bigs ones being, conformity. Conformity is changing your behaviors to fit that of the groups. We do it because we don’t want to seem foolish or look different. There are two major types of Conformity. Normative influence, or the tendency to conform to gain social acceptance; and informational influence, which is to get useful information from others that’s beneficial to you. Different factors can influence how much you conform; how big the group size is, group unamity, or that you admire someone else in the group (Conformity, 2016). Susanna was easily swayed by a lot of people in the novel and conformed to whatever others were doing. When all of her friends wanted to go deep in the hospital for a game of bowling, Susanna followed. Defiance was not something that Susanna showed before being admitted into Claymoore. Although she did not conform to the idea of college and chose to be a writer, she never went against any other social norms. Once arriving to Claymoore she constantly bent the rules and followed whatever the other patients did there. Normative Social Influence plays a huge role here. One patient inspecific was Lisa, who could easily persuade people. Susanna was attracted to Lisa which could have lead her to conform more easily. Susanna followed whatever Lisa told her to do. For example, when she saw Lisa tongue her pills she …show more content…
Although she suffered from a personality disorder I believe she would have been better off not going into Claymoore. There she experienced conformity and the self-fulfilling prophecy that I believe set her back from getting better. By conforming to the mental patients around her and not acting as her normal self, Susanna was seen as crazy. Her relationship with Lisa was extremely unhealthy and was another obstacle that Susanna overcame. By also overcoming the obstacle of accepting her disorder, Susanna was able to ultimately leave Claymoore. The movie, Girl Interrupted, showed me the hardships of being labeled with a mental disorder. Is showed the struggles of being accepted by others and accepting yourself. Susanna was finally able to accept and move forward, and I believe that was the ultimate sacrifice. By leaving her family and growing past her disorder, Susanna proved to be stronger than the labels pushed upon
In the film, American Psycho, Patrick Bateman was a wealthy investment banker who also happened to be a serial killer. He was highly intelligent and was charming which attracted many of the women who came his way. Unlike most people in the world, he lived in constant pain. He was rarely happy with himself, and also hated everyone around him. He felt that he needed to inflict his pain on others in violent ways. He always had something disgusting to say such as, “I like to dissect girls; I am utterly insane.” It is outside of the norm to speak in this way, therefore he would be considered deviant. He displayed feelings of distress as he became frustrated very easily with himself and others. Everything
Lisa was in school and pricked herself with a needle that drew blood. Many told Lisa’s stubborn parents that she needed a psychiatrist. They simply refused to accept the fact that their daughter was in need of anything. When Lisa even screamed out that she needed help, they simply wouldn’t understand. She even w...
Erikson’s Stages of Development was seen most widely in Freaks and Geeks. Whenever there is a mix of freshmen age children in with older adolescents, there is always that awkward stage. When I was in the 9th grade, the school system I was in was still utilizing the junior high school and we would not enter high school until the ninth grade. The year that Freaks and Geeks was to take place, I myself was in the 9th grade, so I sympathized with the show somewhat. Sam and Rory from Gilmore Girls had trust from their mothers, where on the other hand, Danny from geeks and Lane, from Gilmore, dealt with mistrust because of how their mothers were. Danny’s mother expected him to drop everything and get what she needed, even if that meant missing school, and Lane’s mother did not allow her to
In 1978, Susan Sheehan took an interest in Sylvia Frumkin, a schizophrenic who spent most of her life in and out of mental hospitals. For more than two years, Sheehan followed Sylvia around, observing when Sylvia talked to herself, sitting in on sessions with Sylvia’s doctors, and at times, sleeping in the same bed as Sylvia during her stay at the psychiatric centers. Through Sheehan’s intensive report on Sylvia’s life, readers are able to obtain useful information on what it’s like to live with this disorder, how impairing it can be for them, and the symptoms and causes to look out for; likewise, readers can get an inside look of how some mental hospitals are run and how a misdiagnosis can negatively impact someone’s life.
However, these thoughts are not always true all the time. Sometimes Hollywood makes films to show the audience the truth contained in the movie. In the movie “Girl, Interrupted,” the filmmakers have balanced the grim realism of the book with audience-pleasing elements of entertainment in order to make the film more comfortable. The graphic representation of mental illness makes audiences feel its realities, while the use of attractive actresses captures the attention of the audiences and makes it easier to relate to the story.
Scientists have been focusing on the impact of genes on behavior and the development of psychological disorders. This research has contributed to the understanding of many disorders, specifically substance-related disorders.
Therefore, she felt chronically empty and bored on the inside. For the eighth criterion, she does not meet this as Susanna was very passive in the way she dealt with feeling alienated. Instead of having intense anger or recurrent physical fights with others who she felt didn’t understand her, she simply withdrew from everything which is why she was very detached with others. Lastly, she does not meet the ninth criterion for borderline personality disorder as she never experienced any dissociative symptoms. For the most part, Susanna was very conscious of the pain that she was feeling and as detailed earlier in the description section went about connecting to her pain by self-harming herself to essentially outwardly showcase the suffering she was feeling on the
Abnormal Psychology Abnormal psychology in the area within psychology that is focused on maladaptive behavior-its causes, consequences, and treatment. Abnormal psychology deals with how it feels to be different, the meanings the get attached to being different, and how society deals with people whom it considers to be different. The spectrum of differences is wide, ranging from reality defying delusions and severe debilitations to worries and behavioral quirks that we would be better off not having but do not significantly interfere with our daily lives. An example of the milder end of the spectrum is a man who was an eminently successful district attorney, was elected governor of New York on three occasions, and was almost elected president of the United States in 1948. This man, Thomas E. Dewy, reached the pinnacle of success, displaying such qualities as rectitude, efficiency, precision, and nearly limitless capacity for hard work.
The movie Girl, Interrupted, written by Susanna Kaysen, is a good text to use for a Psychoanalytic Criticism lens. A memoir turned into a movie about a young girl being admitted to a psych ward after trying to end her life and living with a mental illness and finding treatment is a great example to show what Psychoanalytic Criticism really is. “The forgetting or ignoring of unresolved conflicts, unadmitted desires, or traumatic past events, so that they are forced out of the conscious into the realm of the unconscious” (Barry, 97). In applying psychoanalytic criticism the definition of psychoanalysis itself must be understood. It is a form of therapy that is used to help cure mental disorders “By investigating the interaction of the conscious
The movie “The Roommate,” revolves around a young girl named Sarah (Minka Kelly) who is starting her freshman year of college. Little does she know that she has a roommate that is diagnosed with numerous mental disorders that she is not treating by taking her medication. When they are initially acquainted as roommates, Sara comes across as being innocent and depicts very normal behavior. However, as soon as Rebecca and Sarah become closer to each other, Rebecca forms an obsession with Sara and strange events begin to occur. Each of Sarah’s close friends or allies becomes hurt, and even killed. As soon as Sara discovers the symptoms of her mental illness, she becomes extremely wary in her presence, and grows more distant of her. Additionally, she sees her as a threat and as the cause of all the wrongdoing that is occurring around her.
We know that she tried to kill herself by taking a bottle of aspirin with vodka even though she denies it so many times claiming that she took it because she had a severe headache, but everyone including Susanna knew it wasn’t true, she just didn’t want to admit it. The second unhealthy behavior was Susanna’s attempts to remain in meaningless relationships to avoid feeling abandoned. In the middle of the movie, she had a flashback of the affair she had with one of the teachers and with a guy that she met at a party after her high school graduation. In both cases, she was having meaningless sex and staying in the relationships so that she felt loved and wanted, and not rejected. The third unhealthy behavior was her mood swings. She experienced a shift in moods and felt like she had no sense of herself at all, she felt herself getting worse. Toward the end of the movie, Susanna was convinced she wasn’t going to get better and she even got defensive over what Dr. Wick (Vanessa Redgrave) and Nurse Valerie (Whoopi Goldberg) were telling her about her diagnosis. Luckily Nurse Valerie insist she is not crazy but
The film Mean Girls tells the story of sixteen-year-old Cady Heron and her new life as a high school student in the United States. She had previously been homeschooled due to her parents work as zoologists in Africa. Since it’s her first exposure to public school, she is a bit naïve and unaware of all the rules and customs. On her first day, she befriends Janis and Damian, who give her the rundown of different groups and personalities at North Shore High. Of all the groups, they recommend she steer clear of most dangerous one, the “Plastics” and their leader Regina George.
Julie Holland, MD portrays a very interesting perspective working at a psychiatric hospital. I can see how many people perceive this book as controversial due to some of the disclosure, judgments or biases she placed on her clients and colleagues. Many different defense mechanisms can be seen throughout the book such as displacement, humor, denial, intellectualization, and isolation of affect, repression, and eventually suppression. Many of these defense mechanisms are not identified within her own pattern of behavior when dealing with stressful
According to Varcarolis’s Foundations of Psychiatric Mental Health Nursing, “Borderline personality disorder is characterized by severe impairments in functioning. The Major feature of this disorder are patterns of marked instability in emotional control or regulation, impulsivity, identity or self-image distortions, unstable mood, and unstable interpersonal relationships.”(Halter, 2014). Susanna demonstrates many of these features. She has few friends, is easily angered, and demonstrates impulsive behavior and poor coping mechanisms. One main coping mechanism that is mentioned many times in the film is Susanna’s promiscuity. This is demonstrated by an affair with a married professor, a sexual encounter with her boyfriend on the unit while in the hospital, and the seduction of a male orderly on the milieu. Self-destructive behaviors are also very common in individuals with Borderline personality disorder. Susanna validates this trait by her lack of motivation, conversations about suicide, and her suicide
Abnormal psychology is the branch psychology that deals with the study of abnormal behavior in an attempt to describe, predict, and explain in order to change behaviors. There are four criteria used in the determination of what is considered to be abnormal they are deviance, distress, dysfunction, and danger (Comer, 2012). Though deviance is hard to pinpoint as it is defined by an individual’s culture and society. The different ways in which to approach treatment for individuals.