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Girl, Interrupted - Essay

Girl, Interrupted

In "," the novelist Susanna Caisson, 43, uses a series of vignettes to describe her experiences as a teen-age mental patient in 1967-68. Using herself as a troubled - and troubling - example, Kaysen demonstrates with humor the severe problems with diagnosis, the sensation of psychiatric hospitalization and the callousness of even the most upper-class of families and hospitals. "Lunatics," says Kaysen, "are similar to designated Hitlers. Often an entire family is crazy, but since an entire family can't go into the hospital, one person is designated as crazy and goes inside." Although she says very little about her family, she clearly sees herself as the family scapegoat.
Caisson's " ...

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friends or lovers to have" - what one of Caisson's therapists called "people whose lifestyles bother them." Certainly, Caisson suggests , such uncertainty is the normal state of teen-agers. Especially the smart ones, such as Caisson herself, who, like clever prisoners, learn to work the hospital's system of rules and restrictions to their own advantage. Patients are checked on by nurses at five-, 15- or 30-minute intervals, day and night. They are escorted everywhere by one or more nurses; for safety, they are allowed to eat only with plastic utensils and to shave with a razor only under watch . Patients learn much more from each other than from their therapists, sometimes for better but too often for worse - how to manipulate and mutilate their bodies, relationships, their environment. By intentionally acting more or less sane, patients soon learn to harass the staff, persuading nurses into spending half an hour opening windows - heavily screened, multiple-locked - just to make ...

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PAPER DETAILS

Added: 12/20/2007 09:18:06 PM
Category: Book Reports
Type: Premium Paper
Words: 571
Pages: 3

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