Susanna Kaysen's Journal-Memoir, Girl, Interrupted Sane or normal people have wondered at one time or another what it is like in a hospital that houses the insane. Susanna Kaysen opens the door to the reality and true insanity of being a patient in a mental hospital renowned for famous ex-patients, including Ray Charles Sylvia Plath, and James Taylor in her book, Girl, Interrupted. She stays focused on reality and her idea of perception as well as the friendships she acquires in her two
The main character in Susanna Kaysen’s, “Girl, Interrupted” and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s, “The Yellow Wallpaper” are similar in the fact that they both were suppressed by male dominants. Be it therapist or physicians who either aided in their mental deformities or created them. They are similar in the sense that they are both restricted to confinement and must endure life under the watchful eye of overseers. However similar their situations may be, their responses are different. In the stories
Bridging Two Worlds in Girl Interrupted Susanna Kaysen's memoir, Girl Interrupted describes Kaysen's struggle to transcend across the boundary that separates her from two parallel universes: the worlds of sanity and insanity, security and vulnerability. In this memoir, Kaysen details her existence as a psychiatric patient diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder in a mental institution where time seems circular alongside a parallel universe where time is normally linear. The hospital itself
Susanna Kaysen’s memoir, Girl, Interrupted (1996), documents the author’s almost two year stay in McLean Hospital, in which she was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder. Throughout this book, Kaysen offers a look into her experiences in the psychiatric ward through retellings of events in non-chronological order. Kaysen’s book begins when she is eighteen years old, and institutionalized, and continues on to her life after the institution. She recounts how she got to the hospital, her experiences
Girl, Interrupted is a memoir written by Susanna Kaysen about her internal struggle with borderline personality disorder and the reality of life in and out of a mental institution. I have noticed extensive differences in how mental illness is displayed through major media outlets and the unfiltered reality from people who have dealt with it first hand. These differences also occurs a great deal in the movie adaptation versus the book; to appeal to a wider audience the movie in linear characters are
Between character differences and overall structure of the memoir Girl, Interrupted written by Susanna Kaysen, it is difficult to find ways the book is similar to the film. Changing the way Kaysen perceives and shares her story with the audience changes the meaning behind her experiences illustrated throughout the text. Rather than seeing the gritty details of being hospitalized in a mental institution as described in the memoir, James Mangold, the director of the movie, portrays a less abrasive
onto others who may be unlike oneself, although in reality, are simply non-conforming, as opposed to insane. In Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted, this fine line between sanity and insanity is explored to great lengths. Through the unveiling of Susanna’s past, the reasoning behind her commitment to McLean Hospital for the mentally ill, and varying definitions of the diagnosis that Susanna received, it is evident that social non-conformity is often confused with insanity. When life becomes overwhelming
The movie “Girl, Interrupted” was released in 1990 and is a true story based on the life story of eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen. It follows her experiences and thoughts with her stay at a mental hospital after being diagnosed with borderline personality disorder following a suicide attempt. In the beginning of the movie, she starts by saying, “Have you ever confused a dream with life? Or stolen something when you have the cash? Have you ever been blue? Or thought your train moving while sitting
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
Susanna Kaysen’s “Girl, Interrupted” is a memoir of an impacting component of her life. Her story follows a part of her life as she enters into a psychiatric hospital in order to better herself during the 1960s because of a drug overdose. Even though Kaysen plans on staying just a few short weeks, she ends up staying there for nearly two years. While remaining in the psychiatric hospital, readers are introduced to some of her experiences that she has dealt with and tells the stories of others who
Analysis This book is a memoir by Susanna Kaysen where she describes her time in the psychiatric hospital, McLean Hospital, in Massachusetts. She begins her story by questioning how it is that she ended up in the hospital. She also describes mental illness as a parallel universe and that people gradually catch glimpse of this universe before they fully enter this new world. The novel is not told in a sequential storyline, but rather is a series of events that happen during Kaysen’s time in McLean
domain of insanity. Susanna Kaysen is the author of Girl Interrupted, a biography detailing her eighteen months in a mental institution. John Nash was a brilliant mathematician, professor, and Nobel Prize recipient, whose passage into schizophrenia is chronicled in the movie A Beautiful Mind. Linda Penland is a dear friend of the author of this paper who was born into a life of poverty, ignorance, and the throws of mental illness, but courageously perseveres to carve out
Interrupted, by Susanna Kaysen, is a memoir that centers around feelings of fear, comfort, and control. These are evident in the scene where Kaysen is speaking with Jim Watson, who wants to take her away from the institution, the diagnosis of borderline personality disorder, and after Susanna gets out, the societal distancing from those associated with disorders. While used differently throughout the memoir, they serve to drive home divisions between those who “slip into a parallel universe” (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
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
judgemental and uninterested society. Narrated and written by the dispassionate Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted focuses on the impending topic of mental illness, attempting to explain it and emphasize its place in society. The vignette style of chapters and
College Susanna Kaysen coped with the realization of having borderline personality disorder through a lot of confusion and uncertainties. Due to the fact that she did not even know why her doctor was sending her in a taxi to a psych ward, she had to process everything as it was happening. There is not a particular moment that stuck out to me in which she denied having a mental illness, as it appeared to me that she was basically accepting of it throughout the story. However, Susanna did discuss
movie adapted from Susanna Kaysen’s memoir and was released in 1999. The movie was directed by James Mangold and it starred Winona Ryder, Brittany Murphy, Angelina Jolie, Whoopi Goldberg, Jared Leto and Vanessa Redgrave. The movie setting was based in the 1960’s, and depicts the lives of the mental patients and how they were treated in a mental hospital. The main character was Susanna Kaysen a Caucasian female teenager from an affluent family. The beginning of the movie shows Susanna talking to a friend
In the movie, "Girl, Interrupted.", Susanna Kaysen is an 18-year-old, recent high school graduate who deals with depression. When Susanna has a nervous breakdown and almost overdoses mixing aspirin and alcohol she is placed in the psychiatric hospital, Claymoore. She is believed to had tried to commit suicide, even though she wholeheartedly denies it, no one believes her because of her lack of motivation and obvious depression. Throughout the movie, Susanna begins to feel accepted in the hospital
The Rescue of Susanna 								 In the story of Susanna in the New Testament of the Bible many valuable lessons are learned. The story begins by describing the wife of a man named Joakim, the beautiful Susanna. She had been taught according to the law of Moses and was very righteous. Because her husband was very rich the two elders who were appointed judges often were often there and anyone with a lawsuit came to them there. Susanna would spend the long afternoons in the