Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen

Author : Susanna Kaysen
Title : Girl, Interrupted
Published : 1993
Publisher : Virago
Genre : Autobiography
Pages : 192

     In 1967, after a session with a psychiatrist she'd never seen before, eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen was put in a taxi and sent to McLean Hospital to be treated for depression. She spent most of the next two years on the ward for teenage girls in a psychiatric hospital renowned for its famous clientele - Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor, and Ray Charles.

     My first time hearing about Girl, Interrupted was when many years ago I watched the film version. At the time I don't think I was aware that it was based on a book and by proxy a real person. It was one of those films that at the time everyone was watching and talking about. So skip to now and it was a book that I had been meaning to read for that last few years. I think Our understanding of mental health issues has come along way. As more people come to talk about it the stigma is starting to lose its grip on us. Although I feel we still have a long way to, for me I find these kinds of books hard to read at a time as I see certain aspects of my self-reflected back. But for everything else, I am lucky I have never had to spend time in such an institution.

      It is trough reading such books that we come to understand that the world of the past was not kind to those who suffered from mental health issues. Things doctors once saw as cures are now seen to be barbaric, treatments such as electroshock and lobotomies do nothing to actually help the patients. What this author does is peel back the curtain to what her experience of these places was really like. While the film gives a stronger central narrative, the book is a bit more lose, think of it as a strain of thought. If you were to spend some time with the author these would be the collectives stores learned over months and weeks. What comes off the page is her feeling of alienation from the world she was living in, It is this disconnect that is the possibles the source of the well. But in coming to such a place she starts to meet others like her. The disassociated of the world, these where people who society didn't know what to do with so the simplest and easiest answer was to lock them away out of sight and out of mind.

     What I will say is there is still humor to be found within these pages. I guess when you have stuck any such group of people together they have to find even the tiniest slither of joy. I suppose for a lot of people the realization that things like depression are not a constant is a surprise. For many it is like waves crashing on the beach there is always the build up to it's worst and then after the crash, you get periods of relief.  When you think hey maybe everything isn't quite as bad as I thought. And then comes the first inkling that the build-up has started again. What Kaysen does more than anything is show that this is going to happen and that as a sufferer you need to realize this. Become self-aware of it and own it. While somethings can never be beaten they can be managed. The book itself is very short and I managed to get through it on breaks at work. But for me I felt it was just the right amount, getting a fairly powerful message across. 

     If what you are looking for is more of a story with a beginning middle and end I would suggest you go for the film. But if what you want is a connection to nothing more real, a realization that the voice in your head is not always right and that there other's out the just like you, then this book will be exactly what you are looking for. It also makes you thank full that electroshock and Thorazine are no longer thought of as a cure for everything.