Girl Interrupted - Essay Example

Girl Interrupted “Girl Interrupted” is a true account of the and narrator of the story named Susanna Kaysen. At the age of eighteen in 1967 she agrees to go to McLean Hospital which was a residential rehabilitation facility in the Massachusetts. She remains in the hospital for nearly two years considering it both a prison and refuge. Her response to the hospital was “…now I was safe, now I was really crazy…” because she was experiencing borderline personality disorder. During her psychiatric treatment at the hospital, she came across many patients including Polly who had self-inflicted burns on her body and face, Georgina her roommate who is struggling to maintain a relationship with her boyfriend Wade who is also a patient in the hospital. Wade is another person that she meets there and he entertains people with stories of his father’s indulging in exploits with CIA. She comes across many more patients who keep her bemused and at the same time the environment at the hospital makes her feels like a captive. Kaysen believes that the hospital is a place meant for her rehabilitation while at the same time she feels that it has taken her freedom away from her. The daily routine dictated by the hospital rules and the complete check on the patients by the nurses at every interval along with no privacy gave way to all sorts of emotions in Kaysen’s persona. James Watson’s visit to the hospital to meet Kaysen indicated how emotionally broken she was when she came to this place. Watson attempts to pull her out of the mental hospital’s environment but her rejection indicates that she is adamant to take the complete treatment. Her past attempt to commit suicide by an aspirin overdose at high-school had worried her the most. Since many creative people have been McLean’s residents, she is convinced that creative minds are liable to mental illness in particular the poets’. The over strictness in the environment has given way to the feeling of imprisonment for Kaysen as she observes the nurses following up on each of the patient’s whereabouts. They take all the things which might cause harm to the patient away from them including earrings. They correspond to the severity of any patient and eventually attend all the activities the patients are collectively involved with. This is the reason why even field trips are restricted and there is a complex system of taking nurses with the patients during these trips. Kaysen has a tendency of drawing conclusion to her own mental health. She categorizes her mind into “vicious” and “velocity” which have caused this type of mental illness in her. Subsequently the girls form a judgment about each of the nurse whom they have encountered so far. Their conclusions about each one of them merely surrounds on the appearance and behavior pertaining to a particular nurse such as Mrs. McWeeney whom they consider to be old-fashioned and strict. Another episode which leads Kaysen into believing that she has been imprisoned in the hospital is when she is taken to a dentist in Boston because her wisdom tooth had gotten infected. She becomes frenetic on recovering from anesthesia because nobody would tell her for how long she had been unconscious. What worries her is that she might have lost time from her treatment phase. Her gradual recovery enables her to search for jobs outside the hospital and resume her relationship with her boyfriend whom she met before coming to McLean. She is so excited that she accepts his proposal for marriage quite impulsively. She begins to disintegrate her disorder wondering the difference between the brain and mind. She believes that her mental illness largely prevails amongst women than in men. She also questions as what extent the psychiatric fads as well as sexism affect her diagnoses of the illness. Years after leaving McLean, Kaysen pays a visit to Georgina, her roommate in the hospital who is now married but as unconventional as ever. She also bumps into Lisa who is another patient from McLean who tormented another patient who was also named Lisa in the hospital because of their common names. However, now she has a child but Kaysen analyzes her as carrying the same persona beneath her current status as a mother in an honorable suburb. The hospital gave Kaysen a sense of freedom that she could not imagine at the time of her admission in the hospital. She is convinced of the fact that her brain has undergone multifarious transformation because towards the end of the novel she attempts to take the reader back to the origin of the title “Girl, Interrupted”. The title of the novel has a deep emotional and mental connection to Kaysen’s past. She stands in front of a painting in New York being dragged twenty years back reflecting on her life with the changing meaning of the painting which indicates the interpretations of her own life experiences. How has McLean affected this thought process is proof of the fact that she stands free in the world drawing conclusions about her own life. But the walls of the hospital give them a sense of imprisonment and captivity which suffocate her to death. Surprisingly in the hospital the environment was such that there was one seclusion room meant for those patients who got into extreme mental case. For them, there was privacy but in a much tighter security. Hence “freedom was the price of privacy” but in a stricter quarter (Kaysen 1994). Her engagement with her boyfriend eventually frees her from the seclusion of the hospital but in any case her nearly two year’s stay in it has set limitations for her in the outside world. Kaysen has portrayed an honest account of her life which the reader initially considers as paranoiac but as the story progresses one is able to understand her situation in a brighter light. The reader is able to see the inner war of the protagonist who is struggling to reach out to the definition of normalcy which is a mere achievement on the part of the general public who can remain sane to the outside world. For Kaysen, it is her creative mind which has caused this mental illness and she prefers to take refuge in the hospital because she believes that she needs the treatment despite poet laureate James Watson’s insistence to pull her out of McLean. Work Cited Kaysen, Susanna. Girl, Interrupted. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Print. Read More