Girl, Interrupted

Susanna Kaysen’s 1993, Girl, Interrupted, is a memoir that explores Kaysen’s time as a teenage psychiatric patient in McLean Hospital in the late 1960s. Kaysen explores the murky definitions of mental health and illness, as she recounters her experience of being diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder and makes compelling arguments about the subjective nature of personality, behavior, and disorder. Girl, Interrupted is a bestselling book and was adapted into the 1999 film starring Winona Ryder. Kaysen’s memoir is credited with contributing to the discourse about mental health in the US, and for helping to decrease the stigma associated with mental illness. This SuperSummary guide is based on the Kindle edition of this book. The reader should be aware that this study guide includes subject matter including self-harm, institutionalization, and suicide.

Summary

In the first chapters of Girl, Interrupted Kaysen posits that people can experience “parallel universes”, or mental states, some of which are judged as disordered and requiring treatment. She recalls her brief appointment with her doctor, during which he forcefully persuades her to admit herself to McLean Hospital for mental treatment. Breaking from a conventional narrative, Chapter 3 is a survey that seeks information about a hypothetical person. The survey includes multiple-choice answers that present historical perceptions or treatments of the mentally ill. They include the person being possessed, requiring medications, surgery, leeches, or electric shocks, or merely being a victim of society’s biases. Chapter 4 describes a fellow patient at McLean named Polly who tried to commit suicide by lighting herself on fire. Polly has a cheerful and kind disposition, and staff and other patients are shocked when she suffers extreme distress about her injuries. Chapter 5 introduces Lisa, another patient who has an influential presence on the ward. Lisa runs away, only to be harshly returned to the ward and stripped of her long fingernails and beaded belt and put in seclusion. This treatment of Lisa upsets Kaysen, who likes Lisa’s humor and admires her independent and assertive nature. Lisa orchestrates an elaborate prank in which she hoards toilet paper and drapes it over everything in the living room, which lifts Kaysen’s spirits.

Kaysen is visited at McLean by a family friend, Jim Watson, who offers to help her leave the institution, which he finds “terrible” (29). While Kaysen appreciates the gesture, she does not want to run away with Jim and gently refuses his offer. In Chapter 7, Kaysen reflects on the unstable and surreal world of American politics in the 1960s. She observes that the paranoid and grandiose theories dreamed up by male mental patient Wade were not any more outlandish than real political events in that decade, though because of his status as a patient his ideas were perceived as “crazy.”

In Chapter 8, Kaysen describes Daisy, a fellow patient at McLean who would admit herself regularly for short stays. Lisa thinks that Daisy is sexually abused by her father, who visits her several times a week. Although Daisy shows signs of being severely troubled, such as only eating chicken and collecting the carcasses in her room, she is released from McLean and later dies by suicide. Kaysen ruminates on the planning that she feels precedes suicide and recalls her own suicidal thoughts and actions. She shares that she wanted a “partial suicide” to only kill the part of her that wanted to die. While at first Kaysen feels “lighter” after these events, she eventually begins to experience severe depression again. In Chapter 10, Kaysen revisits the doctor’s appointment that led to her admission to McLean. Her doctor pressures her to admit herself into the hospital, yet she cannot give informed consent because she does not understand her rights. Kaysen allows herself to be admitted because she feels contrary towards the world and wants to reject it.

Kaysen writes about the interior layout of the McLean ward where she lives. She explains that patient rooms are on the left, while the nursing station is on the right. The ward also includes a “seclusion room” where patients can choose to go to yell or cry, or they can be placed there against their will. Kaysen describes how the nursing staff took their patients for occasional trips for ice cream. She explains the system of privileges at McLean that dictated patient independence and mobility: Some patients are restricted to the ward, while others can travel with nurses, or in groups of twos or threes. Kaysen offers more details about the daily rules at McLean, including their system of five-, 10-, or 15-minute checks, and their ban on sharp objects such as scissors and razors.

In “Another Lisa”, a new patient named Lisa Cody joins the ward and at first gets along well with the other Lisa. However, when Lisa Cody is diagnosed with sociopathy—the same condition as the other Lisa—the other Lisa feels threatened. She pressures Lisa Cody into competing with her, and cruelly pranks her by placing broken lightbulbs in one of her favorite spots. Lisa Cody runs away and never returns to McLean. In the following chapter, Kaysen and her friends Georgina and Lisa lament how difficult it is to meet boyfriends and have sex while living at McLean.

Kaysen again departs from linear storytelling to revisit her first meeting with her doctor. She analyzes his claim that he interviewed her for three hours before deciding to send her to the hospital, and using McLean admission documents as evidence, she proves that their meeting was in fact much shorter than that. Kaysen argues that all mental illness can manifest in slow and fast forms. Some experience a decrease in brain and bodily functions, while others have rapid-fire anxious and intrusive thoughts they cannot control. Kaysen explains that while McLean patients had tense and distrustful relationships with the doctors, nurses, and therapists, they respected their head nurse Valerie, and behaved well for student nurses, who they viewed as peers. Kaysen and her fellow patients were happy to live vicariously through the anti-war, civil rights, and student movements of the late 1960s by watching the news but were disheartened to see activist Bobby Seale in chains in a courtroom. Kaysen shares the story of Torrey, who was addicted to amphetamines and did not want to rejoin her family in Mexico. Kaysen was distressed when Torrey was sedated and forced to fly back to Mexico, and the author has an anxious episode in which she wants to see if her body has normal human bones.

Another new patient, Alice Calais, then joins the ward, and shocks Kaysen by abruptly suffering a severe breakdown. Calais is moved to the maximum-security ward, and when Kaysen visited her, she was disturbed by the ward’s conditions and Alice’s mental state. Kaysen further describes the various therapists and physicians McLean patients were required to see. She characterizes these interventions as unhelpful and demonstrates that these professionals did not try to relate to her or understand her perspective.

Kaysen discusses the challenges and discrimination McLean patients faced as they tried to integrate into society after their hospitalization. She notes that people often reacted with fear or revulsion when they learned she was living at McLean. Kaysen needed a job to secure her release from McLean, but did not get along with her social worker, who rejected her career plan to be a writer and tried to steer her into working in dentistry. When the author accepted a proposal from her boyfriend, McLean released her because she will be a married woman. Kaysen interrogates the concept of the ‘mind’ and its supposed differences from the brain. She questions why therapists specialize in the mind and neuroscientists study the brain when all behavior is rooted in physical reactions in the brain. She thoroughly analyzes her own diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder and argues that most of its symptoms are highly subjective, so any diagnosis would depend on a physician’s personal impression of the patient.

Kaysen then relates what became of Georgina and Lisa after their hospitalization. Georgina married and moved to Colorado, while Lisa became a single parent to a son and wanted to provide him with a stable family life.

Kaysen concludes her memoir by describing her encounters with the Vermeer painting Girl Interrupted at Her Music, which inspired the title of her book. As a teen Kaysen viewed the painting and was frightened of the urgency and warning she felt emanating from its subject, a teenage girl who is looking at the viewer rather than her music. Later, as an adult, Kaysen revisits the painting and interprets the girl differently; she finds her deeply sad and looking for someone who will understand her, much like Kaysen’s experience as a young woman.