Insanity; Illness or Judgment?

Insanity; Illness or Judgment?

The Book, Girl Interrupted, by Susan Kaysen, is an autobiographical piece about her two years at Mclean Mental Institution. Kaysen tells the story of the people and experiences she encountered at Mclean. She struggles with why she is there, how she got there, and if she is truly sick. The line between sane and insane, normal and deviant is a blurry one. More importantly, it is a distinction that, except in the most severe instances of mental illness, scarcely captures the personality it seeks to classify. The ethical issue is that the need to classify people into categories of social norms can cause much harm. People are defined by a few characteristics and then decisions are made that change their lives forever. In some cases doctors seem to rush to these decisions causing more damage than good.

Kaysen begins the book by telling the story of her last day before she entered the hospital. "Perhaps it's still unclear how I ended up in their. It must have been something more than a pimple. I didn't mention that I'd never seen that doctor before, that he decided to put me away after only fifteen minutes" (Kaysen, 39). She goes on to explain that the doctor forced her to enter the hospital. She did have a background with a suicide attempt but she had already decided that she would never try again. The doctor took a look at her file and a pimple on her body that she was picking at and sent her away after fifteen minutes. Kaysen describes this as her "last fifteen minutes of freedom".

Entering the residential psychiatric facility was described as a total loss of privacy. Kaysen describes the patients' loss of freedom in the chapter "Applied Topography." Locked in the dehumanizing world of the hospital ward, the girls are stripped of privacy. The only private space on the ward is the seclusion room. The nurses banish the violent or rowdy to seclusion. Kaysen discovers that the experience can be something other than punishment. The seclusion room is the only place where a patient can find reprieve from the relentless watch of nurses and the oppressive feeling of the wards. (Spark Notes) The seclusion offers a brief break from the ward in exchange for the ability to move around freely. These hospitals are necessary for some extreme cases of mental illness. In most cases, the discomfort of always having someone watch you, never having a chance to be alone, and not having the ability to make your own choices may cause even the sanest of people to go crazy.

Hospitals have a way to make people who do not feel so sick start to think they are very sick. Kind of like an anti-placebo. The patients begin to believe they belong there and start to act more like they are told they are "likely" to act. "After Lisa Cody got her diagnosis, the Lisas started making more trouble. "Acting out", the nurses said" (Kaysen, 59). Lisa was behaving before she was diagnosed as a sociopath. Once diagnosed, she felt as though she needed to act more like a sociopath. The diagnosis caused her to act out violently. Kaysen had a similar experience to her diagnosis. "When I got my diagnosis it didn't sound that serious, but after a while it sounded more ominous than other peoples. I imagined my character as a plate or shirt that had been manufactured incorrectly and was therefore useless" (Kaysen, 59). After a while she felt as though she was worse than the other girls. She could not possibly get better if she felt "useless". The hospital, she should not have been at in the first place, was now the cause of her insanity. She believed it because she was repeatedly told it was true.

The doctors at the hospital were not reassuring to Kaysen either. She would meet with her therapist and always leave more discouraged. He would convince her of being worse off than she felt. It almost seemed as though his job was to make her feel like she belonged in the hospital. "Then he began to tell me what I might be thinking. "You seem sad today," he'd say, or "Today, you seem puzzled about something." Of course I was sad and puzzled. I was eighteen, it was spring, and I was behind bars. Eventually he said so many wrong things about me that I had to see them right, which was what he'd wanted in the first place."(Kaysen, 116-117). Thoughts were put into Kaysen's mind that she felt "sad" and "puzzled", they were not her own. Instead of finding out what was going on with her the therapist just told her what was going on.

A lot