“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. …show more content…
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
Susanna’s actions prove that she is continually working towards recovering. Jim Watson visits Susanna, asking her to run away with him, however, Susanna denies his proposal and stays at the institution: “For ten seconds I imagined this other life...the whole thing...was hazy. The vinyl chairs, the security screens, the buzzing of the nursing-station door: Those things were clear. ‘I’m here now, Jim,’ I said. ‘I think I’ve got to stay here’” (Kaysen 27). Susanna wants to stay at McLean until she is ready to leave; her choice supports what Buddha said, “There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting” (Buddha). Susanna finds reassurance from McClean as she undergoes her journey. Susanna sees the young nurses at the ward who remind her of the life she could be living: “They shared apartments and had boyfriends and talked about clothes. We wanted to protect them so that they could go on living these lives. They were our proxies” (Kaysen 91). Susanna chooses to take these reminders as a positive motivating force along her journey. However, Susanna is also surrounded by patients who have different, more severe psychoses. These girls do not hinder Susanna’s progression, but instead emphasize her
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...
She searches for people that are like her to show her that she has a sense of normality. She feels as though she is alone in this transition in her life and does not know how to cope. She compares herself to a number of different artists that she, now, has a feeling of connection with. She names many successful artists that have all sorts of mental disorders and thought about how they may have become successful partly because of their disorder. This connection to the artists allows Forney to have a sense of not being alone in the world and that there is hope for her in this 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.
In Joan Chen’s movie “The Sent Down Girl”, there are two gifts, one is a kaleidoscope and the other is an apple, received by the central character: XiuXiu.
This documentary is about two girls’ journey as they are released from their juvenile home after committing a crime. At first glance, these two girls look the same; both of them committed some sort of crime and ended up in a juvenile home. Throughout the documentary, Shanae is seen as someone who wants to change because of her past mistake. On the other hand, Megan struggles more because she is starved for love. What makes this girls circumstances different is that Shanae has a family that loves her and want her to get better, while Megan comes from a broken home where her mom is constantly in jail. In order to understand both Megan and Shanae’s struggle, the labeling theory is one of the theories that fit their situation.
The short story “Girl” by Jamaica Kincaide sends a strong message about how identity should not be prioritized over other people's views on you. The female authority figure in the story tells the girl how to act in front of men that do not know her so that they will not recognize the slut she has been “warned against becoming” immediately. Identity is the thing that makes up a person. Identity is the traits and qualities that make people unique and different from others. Since the girl is being told a specific way she must act to be accepted by people that do not know her, that limits the room for her to express herself. If the girl is unable to express herself, she is unable to show her true identity. The female authority figure is sending
...f the bad that is going on in her real life, so she would have a happy place to live. With the collapse of her happy place her defense was gone and she had no protection from her insanity anymore. This caused all of her blocked out thoughts to swarm her mind and turn her completely insane. When the doctor found her, he tried to go in and help her. When the doctor finally got in he fainted because he had made so many positive changes with her and was utterly distressed when he found out that it was all for naught. This woman had made a safety net within her mind so that she would not have to deal with the reality of being in an insane asylum, but in the end everything failed and it seems that what she had been protecting herself from finally conquered her. She was then forced to succumb to her breakdown and realize that she was in the insane asylum for the long run.
Mental illness is a stigma around teenagers and needs more representation. In The First Time She Drowned, Kerry Kletter shines a light on the ups and downs of mental illnesses. Cassie O’Malley was wrongly committed to a mental institution. She is now set free and can restart her life. During this journey, she faces difficulties with her mental health and her poor mother-daughter relationship. Cassie must decide to dive into her past in order for her to move forward. This is an exceptional book because it captures the reality of mental illnesses, the character development of Cassie and teaches the readers a life lesson.
The information acquired over the semester, whether through text or visual media, vividly brought the importance of knowing how one’s gender is identified and developed.
For example, she lacks remorse or any form of sympathy or regret for her actions and sees herself as being superior to other people. Secondly, Lisa saw herself as being invincible, and at one point, Lisa and her friend Susanna described having mental illness as a gift, which allowed them to see and understand the truth.
Elfen Lied is a Japanese manga and anime series written and illustrated by Lynn Okamoto. 107 chapters were released between June 2002 to August 2005 in 12 volumes and 13 episodes that was first aired in July 25 to October 17, 2004, and was broadcast again in 2005. Elfen Lied revolves around the interactions, views, emotions, and differences between humans and mutants called Diclonii which are the newly evolved species. Diclonii look exactly like humans, but the only difference is that the mutants have two distinguishable white horns on their heads and have psychokinetic abilities in a form of transparent arms which no one can see besides the Diclonius specie. They can control them by being able to manipulate and cut objects within their reach called vectors. The series is centered on the teenage Diclonius girl named Lucy, who was rejected by human beings and wants revenge after what happened to her.
“I have found it to be seductively complicated, a distillation both of what is finest in our nature, and of what is most dangerous” (Jamison, 1995, p.5). In “An Unquiet Mind”, Kay Redfield Jameson takes the readers through her experience dealing with manic-depression. Kay was happy and well rounded during her childhood. She developed interest for poetry, school plays, science, and medicine, and was strongly encouraged by her parents. She was surrounded with good friends, a close-knit family, and great quantities of laughter. Kay’s sister, who was 13 months older, described her as “the fair haired one” in the family, whom friends and schoolwork came too easily.
With each analysis the reader gets a greater understanding of suicide and the mental state of those who commit it, as well as some of their motives. One could read only a single chapter of this book and gain a greater understanding than they previously had on the topic of suicide, but when one brings all the chapters together as a whole a much deeper understanding is obtained. Lester’s analyses start with diaries, using that of a girl he has called Katie as his first example. In this 14 page chapter he analyses her diary, not only comparing her to Ophelia from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but using that comparison to show some of her motives and to make sense of them. It is this astute analysis that sets the tone for the rest of the similar chapters, in a way that is not boring but is not lighthearted in the slightest. The way that the whole book works together to give one insight on the topic of suicide makes it a useful resource for those who wish to understand it in a more in-depth way.
A contemporary, semi-biographical novel, The Bell Jar details a college girl’s downward spiral into depression and attempted suicide, and her heroic struggle to regain normalcy.