Girl Interrupted, By Susanna Kaysen

"People ask, How did you get in there? What they really want to know is if they are likely to end up in there as well. I can 't answer the real question. All I can tell them is, It 's easy."(Kaysen 5) The story Girl interrupted starts with Susanna Kaysen, just out of high school and wasn 't having an easy time. She left her boyfriend for her English teacher, who got fired and moved to North Carolina. She had no intentions of going to college. She visited her doctor after trying to commit suicide and he sent her to McLean, a mental hospital famous for the celebrities that have been there and it 's method of treating them. She spent a total of two years in the ward for teenage girls. This is where she met Lisa, Polly, Lisa Cody, Cynthia, and

Kaysen starts the story portraying what kind of “prison” the hospital is. “How could a person who is locked up have a boyfriend?”(Kaysen 25) Kaysen says this after a nurse comes into the tv room to tell her she has a visitor who is a man. She takes a few moments in the story to organize her thoughts on who it might be. Her first reaction is to suspect it is her boyfriend. Shortly after she remembers that they are no longer together because he couldn 't handle seeing her in the hospital. This is when she asks this question to herself. Her story continues with how her roommate Georgina has a boyfriend, however, he is also at the McLean hospital only in a different ward than the rest of the girls. Kaysen explains the rewards systems also. There is a sort of ladder you have to climb to earn freedoms and prove you are getting better. It starts with no privileges, restriction to the ward. Different groupings with nurses are the next step. As you got better the group number could go up and the nurse number could go down. Next you have mutual escort, where patients travel around McLean in pairs. Once you cleared that you got destination privileges. This is where you could call the head nurse once you arrived at your destination at McLean and check in once you got back. The best before you leave is grounds. This is where you don 't have to check in or be escorted. You can travel all over the hospital grounds alone. You can be escorted in public as well, but it is very rare unless

So, how do you get in there? Kaysen tells us her story of how she attempted suicide and her personality disorder. She starts the chapter with her feelings on suicide. She believes that it is a form of premeditated murder and that it is an organized planned act. Her thoughts during the time she attempted suicide were that she needed a motive and she had to practice detaching herself from the world by imagining herself dying. Kaysen’s motive was that her boyfriend had called the police on her for sleeping with her English teacher. Her suicide attempt was one not uncommon; she swallowed 50 aspirin pills. Then as she walked to the convenience store she had time to contemplate what she had done. She thought of it as mistake she would pay for with death. As she walked into the convenience store to retrieve milk her peripheral vision faded, the ringing in her ears got louder, and her pulse raced faster and faster. The last thing she remembers is seeing the checkerboard pattern of the flooring of the store. She was rushed to the hospital and her stomach was pumped. She felt as if she had killed something inside her that made her feel better. The psychological idea behind that feeling is the idea of depression. She felt better like she had killed her old self. Like some how she was cleansed of her mistake, but later in the story Kaysen realizes that nothing died inside her and that her mistake stuck with her. Because she was depressed she start cutting or, as she called it in